Cheat Engine

[mercman]

Used in conjunction with Unknown Initial Value search, and has the potential to dramatically decrease the time needed to perform such a search and find the exact variable.

After the values have been saved, you can start a "Correlation trace".

A correlation trace is used in pairs. I'll explain this later on, but remember there's two strokes to this engine, so to speak.

I'll do my best to explain this, any help in elaborating/simplifying on this original logic is more than welcome, but I'll try to keep things very simplified in my example, but this applies on a much broader scale.

Example for this game will be, "your hitpoints are stored in a graphical bar", of course, this relates to a variable in the background. Unknown Initial Search would be the weapon of choice here.

You know that you don't get health above maxium in this game.

Here are the sample addresses
0x01: 93
0x02: 82
0x03: 100
0x04: 22
0x05: 33

In this example, 0x03 is what we are after, but assume this is spread all over the place, and is much more than 5 bytes. Remember, this is a simplistic representation of the overall idea.

Now, you start the game with full health, and you fire off the unknown intial search, and it stores those values. Storage pass is done. Remember I said the correlation trace takes place in two phases? Here's the first one. You click the button. The stored values recorded by Cheat Engine during the first pass of the "Unknown Initial Value" are stored away. They are NOT discarded with subsequent searches, consider it like a snapshot.

You get beat up, and search for decreased value, get healed back to health, full health, what you KNOW is full health, and then comes the second phase of the correlation.

Taking the original values, it would compare what it stored to the current phase of memory, checking that firstvalue = secondvalue In this light:

0x01: 93.......0x01: 3
0x02: 82.......0x02: 10
0x03: 100.....0x03: 100
0x04: 22.......0x04: 42
0x05: 33.......0x05: 13

After this comparison is made, the data is discarded, and the user can save a second snapshot of the memory

I think this has a strong application when searching for changed values, you can search for a changed value that matched up to a previous one, it would eliminate alot of the changed values it seems.

I know you can accomplish this by doing unknown initial, getting beat up, then heal up fully, and search for unchanged, this seems to be a more direct way of doing it? It's kind of the same, but it seems different somehow.

Now, a realworld application. I'm not asking for help on this, btw, the idea above was spawned out of this situation. I'm hacking this game, no matter what I do, changed, unchanged, etc, I can't seem to get below 1,260 results, and the data is constantly changing for all these variables it has socked away. I can alter states on what I'm trying to hack, but if I could make a direct comparision between the 1,260 previously and the 1,260 currently, meaning, I change it, save, change it once more, search for changed, then change it back to it's original status, then do a comparision, it seems to me that if SavedLocationA does not equal CurrentLocationA at the time this comparison is performed, it would knock out all those other variables, as even though they changed, I am not looking for those, because their current value does not equal their saved value, despite being changed...

Foolish idiocy? Sheer genius? Be gentle.

[stomperz]

You might try MemHack it has some features your looking for.

* Two new sub-search types (only found in this software) help you find your target even faster! Use “Changed By� to search for numbers that have changed by a specific amount, and use “Same As Original� to find numbers that are the same as they were when you first started your search!

Would like to see this feature implemented in CE!