Cheat Engine

rain-13

Hi!

I am playing GTA 1 for some nostalgia. I would like to debug breakpoint this game. But when it freezes I am stuck in fullscreen mode and the only way out is to kill CE from task manager.

What are possible workarounds?

I thought I could run it windowed mode. I run it in Win XP SP2 virtual machine. I tried DxWnd v2.03.77 and 2.05.88 but none of them worked. I am not sure if I configured it right or not. Anything I should maybe check from configuration? Or should I use any other program?

atom0s · Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2023 5:23 pm Post subject:

There are various suggestions you can find for this game on the PC Gaming Wiki here:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto

Based on the info there, it looks like the game uses Direct3D8. If the suggested things there don't work, you can try to use dgVoodoo2 to force the game into a window and to run on newer DirectX versions.

http://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2/

rain-13 · Posted: Sat Mar 18, 2023 5:33 pm Post subject:

Hi!

This wiki suggests some widescreen fix. But that still runs the thing in fulscreen. Plus it only show black screen as soon as I start game - only thing I see is game. Game still runs because I can blindly navigate game menus to exit back to menu but just game itself is not rendered. So moving next to dgVoodoo2.

dgVoodoo2 displays dgVoodoo2 watermark on game - a proof that thing is working. But it still runs in fullscreen mode. Too bad the owner just recently stopped giving support by archiving this project on github.

++METHOS

rain-13 · Posted: Sun Mar 19, 2023 1:21 pm Post subject:

Nope.

I can Alt + Tab only to task manager. I can't alt + tab to other windows. Maybe if there was way to give all CE windows always on top attribute it would work. If I Alt + Tab to anything else then task manager then I never see this window.

TsTg · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:10 am Post subject:

those older games were not designed to be alt-tabbed out, so things like frozen game windows can happen, i believe a warpper like dgvoodoo2 has some option to help with these issues, in addition to forcing the game into windowed mode, but first you need to know what renderer the game is using, so that you can install the necessary files from dgvoodoo properly.

STN · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2023 12:12 pm Post subject:

The way I did it was Windows 98 + Softice = no need to window mode.

Never thought I would use that word again but if you're going oldskool then use oldschool stuff.

rain-13 · Posted: Sun Mar 26, 2023 10:11 am Post subject:

It turned out the solution for DxWnd was to proxy ddraw. Right click on game and then Proxy > ddraw.

Problem was that it was not able to inject dll normally. Proxy added dll into same directory where game.exe itself was making dll injection automatic.

Btw has anyone had success with GTA 1 + dgvoodoo2 ?