Cheat Engine

[Shun_di12]

Hi,

I'm a relative newbie to Cheat Engine and I've gone through some tutorials and I can find memory addresses of on screen values and change them in simple games, however I need a little advice on how to progress on something more advanced.

What I would love to do is hack Outrun 2006 Coast to Coast on the PC. There is a thread over at the arcade controls forum where Howard C has made some really cool hacks for the game however there is something specific that I would like to do.

Outrun 2006 has the full Arcade version of Outrun 2SP as the third option in the main menu. What I would like to do is to get this arcade version to start as soon as you press enter at the main title screen rather than having to scroll to the right and choose the option manually. I have managed to find the dynamic memory address of each of 5 menu items which are simply 0,1,2,3 and 4. If I change the value on this address the menu item changes which, as newbie at cheat engine is pretty cool. However what I really need to find is the trigger from the title screen and get it to somehow "point" at the load trigger for the menu item with a value of 2 which is the arcade version.

My questions are:

Is skiping menus like this possible? I suppose its a bit like a level select really.
What techniques/tutorials can I use to do something like this.

I will happily work this out for myself, but I need a small push in the right direction to make a start.
Thanks in advance.

[Rydian]

1 - Yes, it's possible.

2 - Right-click the address and find what accesses it, you'll find code that reads that address. Alternatively find what writes to it. Edit the code so that the value is always the one you want, so it'll default to that option.

http://forum.cheatengine.org/viewtopic.php?t=570083

So if it's something like
mov [12345678],eax

You can make it into
mov [12345678],2

(Or whatever the numerical ID is.)

[Shun_di12]

Thanks Rydian this is great info.
I read through your tutorial and your reply and I found that:

mov [ecx+000000B4],eax

Writes to the memory address that I found earlier, so I changed it to:

mov [ecx+000000B4],2

Saved it to the cheat table, activated it and when pressing enter on the title screen the Outrun 2SP menu is now the default!

So, the next thing that I want to do with this is actually skip the Outrun 2SP menu altogether and get the game to boot up this mode from the pressing enter on the title screen.

So I found out what reads from the Outrun 2SP menu item when I press enter and found two commands (see highlighted in the attached picture).
Then once the mode is fully loaded (after about 5 seconds) the rest of the commands are displayed in the debugger below.

Both of these initial commands read:
mov eax,[esi+000000E8]

I tried adding this to my modified script and as I suspected the game crashed.

So not knowing too much about assembly code at the moment (I'm a VB.net dev so I am used to high level coding) I'm a bit stuck again. I'm sure someone can push me in the right direction again

[Shun_di12]

Ok, I'm still struggling with this.
I've read several tutorials and watched a load of cheat engine videos on Youtube and I've learned a lot however none of the tutorials seem to be similar to the hack that I am trying to create.

I've tried using Ultimap for when I boot up the Outrun 2SP game mode, but after a lot of filtering I still ended up with 700+ results.

When you hit enter on the Outrun 2SP menu item, you get a loading screen for about 10 seconds, I assume that there is a lot code that the game is executing which is why I get so many results.

Is it possible to emulate the the first instruction when I press enter and then the rest of the code runs as normal and the game mode boots?