Hello y’all,

I need to get some information out of a .mcn file that is used by the Cary WinUV program (for windows XP), I know the file contains the info we’re looking for but it’s not readable on a text editor as per screenshot (the same thing appears via OSS - code and cat). Same for Nano which gives me a lot of tiny amongi.

Cary WinUV for some reason doesn’t display the information we want, who know what they were thinking.

Anyone know a way to read the characters missing?

EDIT: Thanks everyone, I solved by saving it into csv through Cary WinUV but that may not work for everyone so thanks for all the replies

  • TheOneCurlyEnglish
    11•1 year ago

    Doing this by hand is challenging but possible.

    First you need a hex editor, not a text editor. xxd on linux will get you started but you might want something a little more user friendly.

    Then look for a label for a value you know, xxd and other hex editors will show ascii text on the side. Hopefully you’ll be able to identify the value (in hexadecimal, probably 4 bytes but could be 1, 2, or 8 as well) somewhere before or after the label. You might have to get familiar with endianness, two’s compliment, and binary floating point before the numbers make sense.

    Once you know how to read a value after a label you’ll need to find some label for the information you don’t know. If it isn’t displayed in the program it might not have a super readable label.