Cheat Engine

chodness · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 23

Hey guys, couldn't find a solution for this anywhere, so decided to bite it and make a topic.

Sometimes, when I scan for certain things on certain games, my computer... hangs? Crashes? I'll scan for a value within a certain range, and sometime during the memory scan, the screen goes black and the computer stops responding to anything, but as far as I can tell, it is still running, just not communicating with any peripherals. Event Manager shows a power loss when I kill the computer, not when it stops responding, which is what makes me think it's still doing its thing.

I haven't been able to pinpoint the pattern that causes it, but it *seems* to be caused by value-scanning for a specific range of numbers that is different for each game. (e.g. for one game it's <3, for another it's <30, and for another it's <10) Value type doesn't matter, scan type doesn't matter. 'Pause game while scanning' makes it less likely to happen, but doesn't solve it. Using VEH debugger doesn't solve it (don't know why it would, since I'm not using the debugger that I know of, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try). I'm going to try setting scan range to 0-4fffffff, since I've yet to find anything I'm looking for above that, will edit this post with the results of that.

The only real pattern I can discern is that it only happens on games that have a multiplayer component. Now, I never play the online/multiplayer component - in fact, I don't let most of my games through my firewall - but it's still there, and some form of online cheat protection might have something to do with the crashing.

I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with my hardware, as I've pulled all my memory and run the sticks one by one and it happens on all of them, and I can't think of anything else other than the processor that would cause a problem, and the processor hasn't given me any other problems and is also brand new.

I'd appreciate any help anybody could give, and thanks in advance. Also, thanks for reading this wall of text.

Cheat Engine 6.4 64-bit
Windows 8 64-bit

EDIT: to clarify, CE works great with 99% of what it's supposed to do, including all memory scans on every single player-only game I've run it on and most memory scans on games with a multiplayer component, it's just these few scans that are causing it, but they cause it every time.

Dark Byte · Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2015 6:00 am Post subject:

are you scanning the process named [physical memory] or have you enabled the mem_mapped region to scan?
if so, that could pontentially cause some issues

chodness · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 23

I'm scanning the process for the game in question, so I don't think I'm scanning the physical memory. Then again, I don't even see a process called [physical memory] to attach it to, so I could be missing something.

I have mem_mapped on when I scan ppsspp, but I turn it off when attaching to any other process.

Thanks for the quick reply.

EDIT: Scanning the range -4fffffff doesn't cause a crash when scanning for a value that does cause a crash when scanning "all" memory. (000000000000000-7fffffffffffffffffff default, though I didn't count the 0's or f's)

Dark Byte · Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2015 6:08 am Post subject:

is your system overclocked? If so, try running it at stock speed. (not a joke, i've seen several people with 'stable' systems crash because of ce's multithreaded scan)

it's also possible it's overheating. Perhaps that game brings it to it's limit, but ce pushes it right over

chodness · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 23

I actually have never been able to get a system to overclock without crashing, so I don't ever overclock. That's a different story, though.

I don't think it's overheating, due to how suddenly it crashes. Most of the time, it goes "press scan button -> immediate crash" far too quickly for anything to heat up. The rest of the time, there's maybe a second or two between scan start and crash. Also, I think every time it's crashed has been in some sort of pause menu, or in the case of Dark Souls II in Majula (one of the least-intensive places in the game)

EDIT: Sounds to me like it's either very rare, or unique to my system, though. Is there anything in very high or very low memory values that might cause this? Whenever the auto-assembler generates code caves for me, it tends to do so in around the 0E000000 range, so I'm not sure what values way higher than that are for. Also, seeing as how below 100000/above 4fffffff seems like it might be the culprit.

EDIT2: Crashed again last night when searching in that range for a sufficiently low number. For a game where <30 was the problem with a full range scan, <10 is the problem for the reduced range I mentioned.

Dark Byte · Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2015 4:17 pm Post subject:

do you have more than 10GB diskspace free in c: ?

chodness · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 23

Yes, 16.5GB. Enough to dump the entire RAM and page file into it in case of an error. (Not that I know of anything that would do/require it in this situation, but I seem to remember an application that would dump everything it was working on into the hard drive from memory as part of its crash routine.)

EDIT: Speaking of page file, I've mostly disabled mine since I have yet to ever use more than 2/3 of my RAM. Could that have something to do with it? I seem to remember the page file being used for something slightly different than RAM.

EDIT2: Apparently Windows 8 turned the page file back on when I wasn't looking, it just seems to never allocate more than a few dozen MB to it. Weird. Guess that's not the problem.

Dark Byte · Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2015 5:02 pm Post subject:

Hmm, could have been you ran out of memory(the smaller the value you scan for, the more results you get)
Perhaps it's an issue with the hard disk ? (hd controller ?)

off-topic:
turning off the page file is generally a bad idea.
e.g the ce's pointerscan can easily eat up 16GB RAM

Also, unknown initial value scans, make a full copy of the game memory (so if a game uses 8GB RAM, ce will use 8GB ram as well, totaling to 16GB)

chodness · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 23

It might be that I'm running out of memory... I've got 12GB and a memory monitor that tells me I hardly ever use 6GB, though, and that doesn't answer the question of why the reduced scan would crash it, since there's only ~1.342GB below 4FFFFFFF. (Unless CE scans the entire memory and then discards results not within the range, which seems inefficient) Also, I've run pointer scans just fine. In fact, one of the games I ran pointer scans on was one that is causing these crashes. To date, the only thing that has gone wrong with a pointer scan was when it wouldn't write to the file I had chosen, but that was my own fault (I'd told it to overwrite another file that I still had open in another pointerscan window)

I'll give a look into the hard disk thing, too. It's an SSD that I keep only my OS on, so that as few things can go wrong with it as possible, but there's still that possibility.

Do you have any other ideas I can check on?

mgr.inz.Player · Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 5:33 am Post subject:

Also, starting a game with minimum settings is a good idea.
(640x480, window mode, textures low, all effects off, draw distance smallest, etc.)

chodness · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 23

I took a break for a couple days, came back to try to get it working again, and now I can't recreate the problem anymore. So hurrah, I guess. I went to try Player's suggestion of minimum settings, and when it didn't crash I tried to force a crash, and now it won't crash.

For what it's worth, there were about 922mil results for when I scanned Unknown Initial Value on a game with the byte value type. That means CE was using 922MB of RAM (in addition to whatever it uses for the program itself) right?

I'm not convinced it won't start crashing again at some point, especially since I've only been "unable to force a crash" on one game that did it. The others might still, I just don't have time to check them right now.

Dark Byte · Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 4:46 pm Post subject:

Do you mean you didn't play any game at all during that break, or just didn't try scanning with CE?
If not playing any game, it could be it's a cpu/mainboard overheating issue after all

chodness · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 23

Took a break from CE. I actually never shut down my game, though I did put my computer to sleep a couple times with the game up. (Which I was initially reluctant to do, but there don't seem to be any issues with it, at least as far as I can see)

chodness · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 23

Sorry for the double post, but it's been a while so I don't think an edit would serve to bump this for people to see it.

I've tried windowed mode, low graphics, and even turning the Steam overlay off, but none of those things worked.

I also tried pointerscanning Divinity: Original Sin until my RAM was full and my page file had extended to all of my empty hard drive space, and there was still no error there, so I still don't think it's a memory or drive problem, since the pointerscan was able to utilize them alright.

Is there anything else you think I can check on? I'm seriously running out of ideas here.

If it helps, my keyboard loses its numlock indicator light when the computer freezes this way, but any sound that was playing keeps playing like normal.

Dark Byte · Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 8:32 pm Post subject:

Only other thing I can think of is a faulty driver. Perhaps something doesn't like it when it's memory is being read

also, make sure not a single checkbox is checked in settings->extra