To address the original problem - i.e., seeing all the characters in the file - you could always use "bvi" ("binary Vi"). If you don't have access to a system that can run "bvi", you could always just fake it with Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

die "Usage: ", $0 =~ /([^\/]+)$/, " <file>\n" unless @ARGV;
open my $fh, $ARGV[0] or die "$ARGV[0]: $!\n";
binmode $fh;

my ($hex, $char, $count);
{
    my $res = sysread $fh, my $s, 1;
    if ($res){
        $hex .= sprintf("%02X ", ord($s));
        $char .= $s =~ /[[:print:]]/ ? $s : '.';
    }
    if ((++$count % 20 == 0) || !$res){
        printf "%-60s%4s%-20s\n", $hex, ' ', $char;
        $hex = $char = undef;
    }
    redo if $res;
}
close $fh;
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Sample output for Unix text file (note '0A' EOLs):

ben@Jotunheim:/tmp$ ./pbvi unix.txt 
4C 69 6E 65 20 6F 6E 65 0A 4C 69 6E 65 20 74 77 6F 0A 4C 69     Line o
+ne.Line two.Li
6E 65 20 74 68 72 65 65 0A 4C 69 6E 65 20 66 6F 75 72 0A        ne thr
+ee.Line four.
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Sample output for Windows text file (same file, converted):

ben@Jotunheim:/tmp$ ./pbvi windows.txt 
4C 69 6E 65 20 6F 6E 65 0D 0A 4C 69 6E 65 20 74 77 6F 0D 0A     Line o
+ne..Line two..
4C 69 6E 65 20 74 68 72 65 65 0D 0A 4C 69 6E 65 20 66 6F 75     Line t
+hree..Line fou
72 0D 0A                                                        r..
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Update: Corrected by wrapping 'if' statement around the first two assignments in the loop; without it, the script produced a superfluous '00' at the end of each file.