Cheat Engine

[Ruse]

Bear with me, this is most likely the only place where I can explain my story and get the help I need. (Which is excellent, from what I have seen.)

Lately I've been growing tired of waiting for Cheathappens to release their trainers, so I've taken to attempting to create my own trainers with whatever options I want.

Naturally, one can not simply jump into this sort of thing and exclaim "Oh yeah, so thats how I create a +42 trainer! Easy." So I started slow, simple things, I downloaded a basic memory poker called TheCheatTool (or something along those lines anyway). I used that to change simple numerical values in my games, SimCity4, NFS: Underground et cetera...

When I moved from that, I jumped headlong into TSearch and TMK. I didn't spend much time on that when I discovered a more advanced tool called CheatEngine. I fired it up and did the tutorial a couple times just to make sure I had a basic idea of what was involved with the tool. The videos were a great help with that.

Now, I find myself trying to poke pretty much every game I have. Sometimes I get it right, but often I get it wrong. I can't help but feel there are some minor or major steps I may be missing. Thus, I decided to create essentially a large 'Help Me' thread where I can hopefully get some of the answers to the questions that simply puzzle me and hopefully others who run into the same situations I do can read this along with any help given and benefit by it.

So, what I will do is take your through my steps in poking a game I just started working on tonight, but cant seem to get to fly. I'll include pictures simply because it's easier for everyone to see what I'm doing (wrong) than if I have a shortfall in describing what I'm doing. It will also hopefully help illuminate any mistakes I am making.

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So here we go! I fire up STALKER (which is a fantastic game, by the way) and right away I want to poke my cash amount that my character has. Easy enough.

So, I find my address' (two in this case), pick the top one and change it. Right click on it and select 'Find out what writes to this address'. Hop back into the game and get it changed, hop back into CE and I get the appropriate result. Then, I click 'More Information' and get this...

img379.imageshack.us/img379/2704/step1zn6.jpg
Just copy the above link and add http :// before it.

Good, everything is going well so far. I know it's a pointer because the address changes more often than a womans mind. So, naturally I follow through with the next step. I HEX search for 09811124, which is the address that ESI corresponds to.

img264.imageshack.us/img264/7668/step2bk1.jpg
Just copy the above link and add http :// before it.

The tutorial videos suggest that the correct address that is returned is usually the lowest, so I shoot for 093D6CE4 and punch in the offset to 28 since it was [esi+28] right?

And when I do that, I get this result:
img264.imageshack.us/img264/3904/step3nz3.jpg
Just copy the above link and add http :// before it.


Fantastic. So everything should work right? Another thing I'm not really clear on is how to go from that to actually having CE compile an .exe for the actual trainer, but I'm working that out.

What worries me, however, is if its not as simple as that. What if I need to get information from the disassembler? Alright, so I tried that.

img86.imageshack.us/img86/2531/altstepwf8.jpg
Just copy the above link and add http :// before it.

I get this, now, here is where I get a little fuzzy. In the tutorial videos, it goes on about how we snap to the 004whatever because the pointer has 4 levels, and then count up 4 levels right? Well mine is 021, does this mean that my pointer has 21 levels? If thats true, then I am totally lost. I know what MOV means, but when it comes to CMP, CMOVBE and JMP (Which I'm assuming means jump to another address ) I just really have no idea where to go from there...

Perhaps I just have a really difficult time grasping the whole thing. I don't really know... I can look at many different things and just understand how they work easily. When it comes to stuff such as this, I'm afraid I'm a tad bit out of my league.

Any help will be appreciated, and I do plan on asking more questions if you guys can take it . I'll try not to be too annoying as I read more tutorials, though I don't know how much I'll get from those; I guess I'm just more of a 'shown what to do instead of being told' learner.


Mods, if you want me to re-size my images, just say the word.

[ravicus]

I'm not really sure if this would help, but have you tried NOPing and THEN buying? It works on some games, as long as you put the code back to sell
BTW mov=move cmp=compare jmp=jmp cmovbe=???cmpmov???

Edit: Wait a minute, If this is not an online game, the only thing you have to do is change your money value.

[AnthraX1]

hope this helps

[ravicus]

Wow, Another Nooby Post By T3|-| |_|B3R |\|00B