Cheat Engine

[Edgewalker]

I've been thinking a lot about the potential for CheatEngine to be used in debugging and tweaking software. I can edit values during debug in Visual Studio, but the UI for CheatEngine is more suited to the task a lot of the time. I just note what I change, and then hardcode it later.

Has anybody else used CheatEngine for runtime experimentation on their own projects? How is it best used? I'm sure it's more useful than just making Meat Boy palatable.

[ulysse31]

Yes, I have used it to this end. I wouldn't think it's too usefull concerning runetime experimentation on our own project, ollydbg would be better there imo.

Cheat engine's Pro vs ODBG:
Quick attach.
Some special features like "find out what access/writes" or "see what address this instruction access".
Veh debug very stealthy (which is not a pro if you work on your own project cause I assume it's not debug protected).

Cons vs ODBG:
Various bugs including some failure on the disassembled instructions (among other thing sometimes it fails to mention dword pointer [])
The buffer content is not as easy to see as it is on ollydbg.
You cannot right click a stack value and say "follow in dump/assembly", instead you can just double click the stack value and sometimes it will bring you to it in the assembly window, somtime in the hexa one, this is really annoying tbh.
You don't have an "analyze this" function which makes thing clearer.
Whenever you wish to right click a register and follow it in dump/hexa it will overwirte what you have in your copy/paste windows function.
Lose all the ODBG plugins which often come handy.

[atom0s]

[pkedpker]

I use cheat engine to test stolen offsets/memory addresses from other hacks and add into my own master hack.. so ya I do use it as a production tool