DLL hacking...

[Mini-Me]

Hi there.


I understand the concept behind DLL's and what they are for, but am wondering if it is at all possible to hack a DLL to make it do it's task differently.

Naturally, you would need to know exactly what it is trying to do normally(the DLL), before you could begin to answer this question.

"Why would you want to hack dll's?" I hear you ask.

Well, in this particular case, I use a program which saves it's datafiles via a ZIP and UNZIP dll's.(zipdll.dll and unzdll.dll)

The compression is preset at maximum, and I want to either bypass the compression totally, or at least make it lower then it is.

WHY? - Using the currently high compression, datafiles take a very very long time to save and load, and I want to cut down on this loading/saving time.

I am not actually sure if it is the host application(the EXE) which sets the compression-ratio, then hands the data to the dll, which hands control back to the host application once it has finished, or if it is fully the dll which accepts the data from the host, encodes it, then hands control back.

...i hope this question is making some kind of mad sence to some of you...

[mjc]

Yes, dlls can be 'hacked' and if you look at someplace like http://www.virtualplastic.net/ there will a great deal of info on how to do it...but most of what they cover is for appearance changes.

Now on to the problem at hand...no, it is not likely to help as it is probably like you guessed--the main exe sets the compression ratio.

[kpmwrestler]

try using reshacker.

[Mini-Me]

Thanks to both of you - I am checking both of those suggestions out now.
Not really for a solution so much as to teach myself some more about the whole DLL concepts.