PECompact

[LordAdef]

Good Morning from South America Masm32!

It's Monday morning, a new week in Masm32..

I'd like to learn a bit about the "Pros/Cons" of using a tool such as PECompact. It's an interesting topic I guess for the week kick off.

Any opinions?

Cheers, Alex

[jj2007]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/353634/are-there-any-downsides-to-using-upx-to-compress-a-windows-executable

Full of half correct and half wrong information, but a fairly good read, too.

[Siekmanski]

One of the best exe packers, no false positives from anti-virus software, as far as I know.

[mineiro]

These tools envelope an exe file in a hope that reverse engineering will not be done. They are called packers.
pros:
they try to compress executable file, so final size is less than original, also string search on exe file will not be show, they hidde functions being called from your program.
cons:
Because they have been created to try to secure final program they can have malicious code that will be hard to find. Virus writers (persons that write programs with malicious intentions instead of good intentions) use this tool, not only business guys.
Understand that virus are not bad programs, they are just programs that replicate itself like happens on normal life. Programmer that have created virus yes, they are bad, they inserted malicious code on a program. Computer viruses have been born from one thesis university, create artificial life inside device, if my memory is good the thesis guy is from Europe.

[hutch--]

I can recommend it, Jeremy Collake is an old friend of mine and a very clever guy. I have used PECompact for many years with all of my 32 bit MASM and PB software as it improves load time. Have never had any problems with AV using it where UPX is garanteed to drop AV alerts as its the virus writers favourite.

[LordAdef]

thanks guys,

concerning image size, is it still worth compressing my images, or I can rely on PECompact for the job?

[Siekmanski]

Some packers don't recognize image types like jpg and make them even bigger.
I don't have PECompact to test, but I bet Jeremy Collake takes care of pre-compressed parts in the exe files.

There is also an exe packer called Crinkler, this one is unbelievably good in crunching small apps such as intros.

www.crinkler.net

[jj2007]

There is also an exe packer called Crinkler, this one is unbelievably good in crunching small apps such as intros.

Looks interesting but...

Code Select Expand

TMP_FILE.OBJ: error LNK: Cannot find symbol '_InitCommonControls@0'
TMP_FILE.OBJ: error LNK: Cannot find symbol '_HtmlHelpA@16'
MASMBASIC.LIB: error LNK: Cannot find symbol '_SysFreeString@4'

with

Code Select Expand

OPT_DebugL /entry:start \masm32\lib\kernel32.lib \masm32\lib\user32.lib \masm32\lib\gdi32.lib \masm32\lib\ComDlg32.lib \masm32\lib\msvcrt.lib \masm32\lib\HtmlHelp.lib \masm32\lib\PsApi.lib \Masm32\MasmBasic\Res\tinf.lib \masm32\lib\Ole32.lib \masm32\lib\Shell32.lib \masm32\lib\Gdiplus.lib \masm32\lib\masm32.lib \Masm32\MasmBasic\MasmBasic.lib

[newrobert]

good idea

[Siekmanski]

Try something like this,
crinkler rotatingcube.obj kernel32.lib user32.lib gdi32.lib /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS /ENTRY:start