Cheat Engine

[BlindGuyNW]

Hi ALl,

I'm a newbie to Cheat Engine with a fairly unusual use-case, trying to make a particular game accessible for me as a totally blind player. The X series is a super complicated single-player space simulation, which has a lot of spoken audio, which is the only reason I'm even considering this project.

I'm trying to figure out how to get access to menu selections, and determine which option is currently selected so I can relay it to my screen reading program. The game has a very complicated menu structure, and a lot of the menus change dynamically based on game conditions, so I figure a good starting point would be to vocalize the opening screen. I have a program which should enable me to do this, but I'm not sure what kind of memory structure I should be looking for, how to determine the current menu item, etc.

Any insights into how I can begin tackling this would be greatly appreciated. The game is already ~98% accessible, and with a few judicious tricks I foresee near 100% without too much effort.

Thanks for any advice

[sbryzl]

This game functions similarly to an emulator in that it uses a small number of operations to access all the data, pointers to data and pointers to other functions. It's possible to delineate it all but it would be pretty difficult for someone new to it. I never looked at how menu text was accessed though so maybe that could be handled more easily.

[BlindGuyNW]

Thanks for the reply.

The program I had in mind to use for vocalization is called SoniFight. I can't link to it directly yet, but it seems to be pretty good at vocalizing things based on pointer chains and watching memory addresses. They suggest using CE to find some of that info, but thus far I haven't had a lot of luck figuring out what I'm looking at.

THe hardest part for me is that 98% of the game is already quite playable, and the game menu text is obviously already in the memory somewhere. I'd love to avoid having to depend on my screen reader's unreliable OCR feature.