Cheat Engine

[Brojack]

Hello!

I'm currently trying to mod "Sonic Adventure 2" on Steam, and am a complete noob, so I'm running into some problems and need someone much smarter than me to help me out.

General description (for those who know nothing about the game):

Every time enemy #1 on a stage is killed, they drop a random item. The address of this item changes every time you load the level.

I've found a pointer (with like 6 offsets) to that address. However, this address is only populated AFTER the enemy is killed (in other words, once the random item is on-screen).

I want to know what is putting the value of the random item in that address, so I can influence it.

So I select my pointer, I click "Find out what writes to this address", and then "Find what writes the address pointed at by this pointer", and... absolutely nothing shows up. Even though I can physically see the value at that address changing before my eyes (so something must be writing to it), CheatEngine isn't picking anything up.

What do?

Game-specific description (for those who want to try and replicate):

The "random item" in question here is the colour of Chaos Drive dropped by a GUN robot once killed.

I'm doing all of this specifically as Tails on the Prison Lane stage, and I'm always killing the GUN beetle on the right to spawn the Chaos Drive.

I want to know how the colour of the Chaos Drive dropped is decided, so I can influence it.

Below is a link to a Cheat table (apologies for the strange formatting, the forum won't let me post URLs in a nice way yet) that contains the pointer to the Chaos Drive value. You can change it to any value between 0-3 and see that the colour of the Chaos Drive changes accordingly (but only AFTER it's already dropped).

https
://
drive.
google.
com
/file/d/1i891qS7Hf9ZeWXUWCtvKaa1IKWa5YiFy/view?usp=sharing

If you got this far, thanks for reading.

Brojack