Cheat engine outside of MAME

Heihachi_73 · Post by **Heihachi_73** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 8:43 am

Is it possible to somehow port the cheat engine to a generic program (e.g. trainer) to use on PC games? I ask this as my program coding is zero!

Lately I've been using Quick Memory Editor (shareware program, used to find RAM locations and has a simple poke option, but can be buggy and also forgets programs if they are closed and reopened) and the Trainer Maker Kit, which is a little lacking in features although it does have a simple Visual Basic style GUI to make a simple (but ugly) GUI with the cheats hard coded in it.

It would be perfect to have such a program which, instead of having cheats hard coded to the program, has an external cheat.dat like MAME along with the well-known interface to also create cheats.

RedBeam · Post by **RedBeam** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 6:51 pm

Use WINhex. It is a powerful program it manipulates directly RAM and ... much more guy!!!

Heihachi_73 · Post by **Heihachi_73** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:15 pm

I know WinHex could be used as a trainer in a way, but I was thinking more of making a small program so you wouldn't need those.

That way, the program would find the game program (by CRC like in MESS, but no ROM name), and you could make cheats instead of ending up with only a couple and having to make them each time you ran WinHex or whatever. Since it would use cheat.dat instead of being compiled in the EXE, anyone could add and save cheats to the external text file - one thing which can be sorely missed in trainers.

In a way, the [pec] program is similar in having a cheat database, but it relies on either a PSEmu-compatible plugin, or bleem! which is slightly outdated by about 10 years.

I'd like to be able to make a program (or have someone else to help due to my crappy VB skills!) which is the trainer, cheat editor, and also really usable.

For another idea, which would probably be impossible, it would be interesting to have a menu appear in a game, just like in MAME. So you would hit (Tab) or something and the cheat menu would appear.

Having the cheat menu superimposed over the game would save people alt-tabbing all the time to the program. The only problem I can see is it would probably not be possible - all the different graphics APIs (OpenGL, D3D...) would be hard to make one program detect and use.

Here's a fake cheat, just to show how it would look.

Code: Select all

; [ ZiNc 1.1 ]
:B1A7FCE2:60000000:0000000:00000000:FFFFFFFF:-----------------------
:B1A7FCE2:60000000:0000000:00000000:FFFFFFFF:Tekken 2 (TES2/VER.A)
:B1A7FCE2:60000000:0000000:00000000:FFFFFFFF:-----------------------
:B1A7FCE2:00000000:66ECAC0:00000005:FFFFFFFF:Select Character's Moves P1
:B1A7FCE2:00100000:66EF450:00001000:FFFFFFFF:Select Character P1
:B1A7FCE2:00100000:66F43E8:00001735:FFFFFFFF:Infinite Time

The cheats are probably completely wrong(!), but it's just there to display how it would look in cheat.dat - one good thing is that every cheat name would line up because of the CRC32 checksum.

Post by **Pugsy** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 5:05 pm

I would also love to see this but would be a massive job to port the MAME cheat engine into a standalone program unfortunately - far too many issues to be resolved. A standalone plugin/source addon with no dependences for use with other emulators is slightly more possible but I wouldn't hold my breath that it will ever get done either unfortunately...

There are a few PC utils that are out there that aren't too bad, I've used Tsearch a bit in the past and it seems fairly good. Doing a search on google also turned up this:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheat_Engine

Might have a play with this later, sounds fairly good and seems to have active forums which is always a bonus.

Heihachi_73 · Post by **Heihachi_73** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 9:12 am

Thanks for the link! I might have too look at this one.

I decided to go across to the MESS side a couple of days ago and found one 'bug' as such - if you use a driver which has more than one item loaded, cheats will only save as the first item in the list. Linky

I do wish the SNES's pseudo-3D effects worked in Mario Kart though, not too easy to drive around on a yellow background! They do appear occasionally, mostly in the mirror, but not the top where you're playing. With the help of my old SNES9X I managed to get a few cheats for it, although they've probably been everywhere for the past 14 years since the game was released!