Cheat Engine

[melovewrestling]

Hi everyone,

I am wondering if there is a difference between scanning memory for normal window games and games that are played via emulators?

So I was trying to do the following:
Turn off the submission hold countdown timer for :WWE day of reckoning (one of the best wrestling game!)

The emulator i used is Dolphin. (Also tried some X360 WWE games on Xenia and with similar result).

I have got the basic things all setup (MEM_Mapped and such) so that CE can linked to the emulated games. And the value in the games can be correctly scanned (i think)

There are many nice videos on youtube explaining how to look for time in games. And usually the time can be identified uniquely in a PC game. (normally they are float/double). But i have tried from float, double to bytes. Changed value / increased / decreased.

Since it's a countdown timer that only appear when you are applying a submission, I am not sure if the address will change when you apply a new moves. So I'd do a new scan instead of continuing with increased/ decreased value.

The closest i've ever got was the address for the visual representation of the countdown bar.. While I can have it fixed, the countdown apparently was still carried out in the background and after a while the submission hold is off. (imagine the excitement at that moment when the bar got fixed, and the frustration afterwards lol)

Since I experienced the same for both Gamecube and X360 (dolphin and Xenia). I wonder if there's a specific technique needed to look for a countdown time in Emulators?

Or has anyone here got a successful case with hacking the time value for emulated games?

Many thanks in advance.

[Csimbi]

If the emulator does not encrypt its own managed memory, then no, there is no difference, you can find values easily from the outside.
I can't comment on the emulators listed above though as I have not used any of them.
Give it a go and see what happens - there's no harm trying it.

[melovewrestling]

I think it's not encrypted as I did manage to hack some value like character stats and the display interface.
It's just the time value is a bit elusive lol.. I will start to try to target also those rapidly increasing values, saw on youtube that in some cases even when you pause the game the time value will still be counting.
Will post back in case i found something.
Thanks a lot for the msg!

[melovewrestling]

Finally I managed!
I learnt that for Emulator one will need to use the value type called Big Endian Value to look for the value. On youtube:
"How To Add Big Endian Custom Value Type in Cheat Engine For Emulators | Cheat Engine Tutorial"

And finally with this, the countdown timer for the WWE games emulated by Dolphin was located. DOR1 was with 4 bytes while DOR2 was with 2 bytes. Both with the decrease value method.

Hopefully this can help the others with similar value hunting!

I'll try next with X360 and PS2 Emulator. Hopefully they work as well!


p.s. besides the above link i'd recommend the following 2 experts whose channels have many nice tutorials. Really learnt a lot from them!

Stephen Chapman
Cheat the Game