Catch22 (James Brown)

Catch22 is the one-man software house of British developer James Brown, a veteran of the Windows shareware scene whose entire catalog is epitomised by the single, long-lived utility Catch22 HexEdit. Since the late 1990s this lean hexadecimal file editor has provided programmers, hardware engineers, malware analysts and retro-gaming modders with a lightweight alternative to bulkier IDEs: arbitrary files can be opened, inspected and modified at the byte level, with changes reflected instantly in both hexadecimal and ASCII panes, while a built-in data inspector interprets integers, floats and time stamps in little- or big-endian order. Search-and-replace works on hex strings, ASCII text or bit patterns; checksums and hashes are calculated on the fly; and the optional structure viewer overlays C-style templates so that binary formats, disk sectors, ROM headers or network packets reveal their fields without leaving the window. Because the program requires no installation and stores its settings in an INI file beside the EXE, it has become a standard component of portable toolkits carried on USB sticks for on-site firmware updates, emergency disk repairs, trainer development or quick patches to game executables. Catch22 HexEdit is offered for free on get.nero.com, where the latest release is delivered through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always fetching the most recent build and allowing the utility to be installed singly or batched alongside other applications.