Cheat Engine

[pmp7331]

Hey Dark_Byte,

How much experience did you need to make Cheat Engine?

It's obviously not your typical program. And the fact that it doesn't have competitors (at least good ones) speaks for itself.

[STN]

Anybody with good programming skills can make one, the debugging part requires knowledge of assembly and the internal workings of debugger and
OS.

As for competition, there is no money in it so nobody cares, if there was, you would see every Bob and Joe making their own because it doesn't take rocket scientists to make apps like CE. There is artmoney which is paid and look at where that is now, MHS was good but the dev quit it and it wasn't very user-friendly at all which i thought is the reason it never was that popular to begin with. Ollydbg is a damn good debugger and dominates a totally different scene. Some people have tried to monetize but it can't be monetized because there will always be good free alternatives and a paid product can not offer something that free one can't.

I have made my own memory scanner in assembly (to be super fast) just for the heck of it and i realized then the amount of time and effort it will take to publicly release and maintain it, the bugfixes, code-optimizations and everything and all that for free. Ain't nobody got time for that so yeah, you aren't going to see any competition unless there's money involved. Besides, CE is open-source which means its not going to die ever, like how Tsearch died e.g.

[atom0s]

It's hard for something to come in and be competitive at this point of the game with how long CE has been around and how much is already available to it, such as all the public trainers / cheat tables that rely on it. There is not much a competitor can do besides either mimic CE extremely close so that CE related assets like cheat tables will work in their own program.

There has been various other public memory scanners but none have survived the time over Cheat Engine due to various things. One major thing CE has going for it is that it's open source, while most of the previous competitors were not / are not.

For example here are some others:

TSearch
- Closed source.
- Poorly maintained by a single developer.
- Hard to find even when it is relevant. (It changed websites so often.)
- Lack of more in-depth features like a full disassembler.
- Lack of updates and eventually discontinued.

TSearch was one of, if not, the first memory scanner out there. (Discounting all the tiny mini-scanners people homebrewed.) For its time, it was amazing. The EasyWrite portion was a first of its kind feature in an application for game hacking and really set the ground stone for what was expected in memory scanners to follow.

However, due to TSearch having a single developer and being closed source, updates were rare. Along with that, for its short life-span, TSearch was usually a headache to find since the website for it constantly changed and there were so many fake/infected versions of it floating around on the web.

Artmoney
- Closed source.
- Costs money for 'advanced' version.
- Very basic GUI / features.
- No disassembler.
- No scripting language or feature(s).
- Lack of updates.
- No plugin system to extend or improve the core.

Along with the basics of Artmoney, they implemented kernel mode scanning BASED on CE's code. They used Cheat Engines open source driver code to make theirs. (Kind of shitty to do since they sell theirs.)

Quick Memory Editor
- Closed source.
- Costs money.
- Lacks in-depth features. (No debugger, no disassembler, no scripting etc.)
- Very basic GUI with minimal features.
- No real community around it.

Quick Memory Editor has been around for a while now, however it is a 'one-and-done' type application meaning that the developer made it with the sole purpose of trying to make some profit. There are no updates for it, it has pretty much no special features at all, and has no community behind it at all. Their site is dead along with their forums being entirely inactive.

GameShock
- Closed source.
- Single developer for its time.
- Lack of updates and features.
- Very basic feature set, searching, freezing, editing, and that's basically it.
- Website for it is gone now.
- Only Shareware sites still have the download for it.

GameShock was a short lived application. It had potential, a clean UI, and was pretty fast however it lacked really any backing or community. Being a single developer and closed source also aided in its short lifespan given that updates were not often and the overall addition of new features was non-existent.

Memory Hacking Software (MHS)
- Semi-closed source. (Don't think newer versions source code was released.)
- Single developer for its time.

There is not really much 'bad' to say about MHS. It has been the biggest contender to Cheat Engine. It has supported [nearly] all the same features of Cheat Engine as well as some custom features of its own. It has a lot of features to help it stand on its own as well against Cheat Engine.

For its time it was a very good alternative to Cheat Engine. That said, MHS is 'dead' currently as L.Spiro has stopped development and their community forums are dead now.


I'm sure I missed a few mini-scanners in between the times of the above ones but these are the ones that had any bit of recognition publicly that I remember.

Overall Cheat Engine has stood the test of time with Dark Byte staying interested in the project and constantly updating it. Cheat Engine being open source helps a lot as well as it gives others the opportunity to contribute to the project. Cheat Engine gained HUGE publicity when creating UCE's became a thing to bypass anti-cheats given that it was open source. So the forums exploded with a ton of new people when anti-cheats started being more developed.

Cheat Engine also came into the scene a perfect time to really gain attention and capture people into being more interested in it then other scanners. For a long while the only two other scanners available were ArtMoney and TSearch. Cheat Engine quickly blew them out of the water feature wise. Then for the longest time Cheat Engine had no real competitor to take any part of the community so the site/forums grew fast.

MHS has been the only real application to stand up to Cheat Engine in features. But given how late into the game it was started and advertised I don't think it really took off as a publicly accepted scanner but it definitely has the features to stand on its own.

[Geri]

Nah, I don't think that TSearch is that old. I have used GameWizard, it even had a DOS version, it was kinda similar to CE by design. And one of my old favorites was GameHack 2.0.

Dark Byte has also used GameHack, I read it on his very old website that CE was started to replace GameHack, because I think the developer died (that's what they said on the net). And earlier versions of CE are actually supporting GameHack cheats. It was a fine tool and I still use it on my very old computer where I play damn old games.

Anyway, while these were well known and fine memory scanners in the past, CE can do so much more. Multiple debuggers to remain undetected and lots of other options, some of them are not even documented. Dark Byte had put a lot of work into it and it is far beyond a simple memory scanner.

[pmp7331]

Wow thanks for all the good answers! I didn't expect so much food for thought :)

I asked because this program is really spectacular. In fact the only (minor) feature I'd improve on would be an option to visually change all the zeroes to black when looking at memory regions. Would make it take 1/10th of the time or less to identify target regions to hack.. I might just be bad at looking at byte arrays though.. Other than that, I'm just surprised that it makes hacking so easy.

Good job Dark_Byte! (And contributors too!)

[pacifista]