Cheat Engine

Today, I decided to write about one of the very few *free* things that entered my line of sight and was noteworthy of writing a blog on. This *thing* is called Cheat Engine. As the name suggests, its mainly about hacking games or in simpler terms, provides us with a mod of the game.

Cheat Engine, commonly abbreviated as CE, is an open source memory scanner/hex editor/debugger created by Eric Heijnen ("Dark Byte") for the Windows operating system.Cheat Engine is mostly used for cheating in computer games, and is sometimes modified and recompiled to evade detection. This program resembles L. Spiro's Memory Hacking Software, TSearch, and ArtMoney. It searches for values input by the user with a wide variety of options that allow the user to find and sort through the computer's memory. Cheat Engine can also create standalone trainers that can operate independently of Cheat Engine.

- Sourced form WikiPedia 

   First of all, what is Cheat Engine?

Cheat Engine is an opensource tool designed to help you modify (mostly) single player games so that the player can make them harder or easier depending on their preference. For example, if you find that 100 HP is too easy in a particular game, you can try playing the game with a maximum of 10 HP.

Cheat Engine (CE) also contains several other useful tools to help debugging (in reality-just messing around) with games or pretty much any application. For example, as a prank, one may alter the download speed shown in a torrent client/download manager to perhaps 100 gbps or something like that.)

CE also comes with a memory scanner to quickly scan for the variables used within a game and allow you to change them. Other features included in this package are:- debugger, disassembler, assembler, speed hack, trainer maker, direct 3D manipulation tools, system inspection tools, etc. CE is the ultimate tool for a mischievous programmer.  So, read on to know how CE does that.

Although CE can do quite a bit more, let's take a look at an example of "hacking" a game. Now, nearly every single application that exists, uses what's called "variables" to store various value. In a game, for example, the player's HP, level, ammo, position - literally everything is stored in certain variables. There could be a certain variable with values 0-100 keeping the track of hit points (HP), another variable keeping track of which level the user currently is in, and perhaps three-more keeping the track of X,Y, Z coordinates of the avatar or player in a 3D game. Almost all the games these days run in cycle. What I mean by that is the game has a recurring infinite loop of some functions (group of statements) that goes on and on until the player exits/pauses the game.

Inside the loop, the function's code checks to see if any user event has occurred. Did the user press one of the arrow keys? If so, then update their position accordingly. Did he/she click the left mouse button? If so then decrease ammo by one and call the function to launch a projectile from gun and so on. Certain aspects of the game rely solely on a particular variable and trust it to maintain a legit value. Considering the fact that an average user may not even know of these background variables, it's reasonably a safe bet. It's just a game after all and implementing double checks, sealed environment (sand-box) and encrypted values is not worth spoiling the gameplay and performance. This small point is what leaves almost every single player game at a risk to nosy software such as CE.

This is also the reason why CE does not (yet) work for most of the big online games like RuneScape, WoW, Aoc etc. since the data and any changes done to it are always double checked by the severs copy. Whatever happens at the server, stays at  the server and although you could make yourself *LOOK* like a pro, that would only be because of a dumb browser.

What CE does is to try and find out what variables the application is using, the addresses at which they are stored in the RAM and possibly tamper with them according to the requirements. For hardcore gamers, this tool is god sent. You can easily increase your speed in 'Need For Speed', get infinite ammo in 'Call Of Duty' and avoid killing a thousand people or typing cheat codes for 'Grand Theft Auto'.

And, as a bonus for programmer, I have already mentioned that CE is an open source tool-it's waiting out there for you programmers to explore.

So, by now I must have convinced many of you that the *free* *thing* we started talking about in the beginning is actually the ultimate tool for gamers. You can visit the download page for Cheat Engine from here Or you can visit it's official website here to know more about it.

Unfortunately, CE is available only for Windows platform. So all those using Mac, Linux etc. would have to wait till I look something up for you guys.

Well, after browsing through the internet for a couple of hours, I finally was able to find something that might interest the Mac users. Yes, some of you might have guessed by now - I have found some interesting CE alternatives for Mac users. You can view them here. I have not been able to try them out as of yet, so even I remain as clueless as the other Window's users.

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