Cheat Engine

SleepiDreamer · Cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 27 Aug 2021 Posts: 41

In my previous forum post 'Code overloads game crashing it' (I'm not allowed to send links yet) Dark Byte told me about 'watches'. I've been searching for ages and can't find anything about it. Would anyone mind explaining it?
I'd also like to know about the Lua part of the post.

LeFiXER · Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2021 9:56 am Post subject:

A watch is a specific type of breakpoint. I believe they are a hardware breakpoint and there is a limit of 4 for hardware breakpoints. Software breakpoints can have as many as you like.

As for the code, a response that no one really likes, but you should read up a bit about Lua as it will help you understand more. There are ample resources for Lua programmaing; however, I will explain here.

ParkourPenguin · Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2021 11:21 am Post subject:

Normally, breakpoints are used to stop execution at a particular instruction. Watches are a type of breakpoint that stop when a value in memory is written to or accessed. They typically rely on hardware to do this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_debug_register

You can implement it in software too by marking a memory page as read-only or no access. This will cause a page fault that the OS alerts the debugger about when a value in that page is written to or accessed respectively. However, this affects every value in that page and therefore could slow down the target considerably.