Cheat Engine

i_hate_drm · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 17 Sep 2024 Posts: 2

Are there any memory reads that cannot be detected by Cheat Engine?

I'm currently debugging a PC game with a black box in the menu.
I've found an address that can modify the box's width.
When the address is written to, I break, change its value to 50%, and set a "Break on Access" on it.
The next time the game breaks, it's because a different value has been written to the address.
But on the halted game screen, I can see that my value was read - as the box has been reduced by 50%.

What read the memory address? And why didn't Cheat Engine detect it?

atom0s · Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 2:08 pm Post subject:

You can try and use a different debugger in Cheat Engines settings to see if that picks up the other accesses happening to the address. The VEH debugger is generally the better option in many cases where being detected by some means of anti-cheat or ant-debug isn't a concern.

Dark Byte · Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 2:47 pm Post subject:

Perhaps the memory is mapped in another location or it's read out by another process, or it's device memory like gpu mem

i_hate_drm · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 17 Sep 2024 Posts: 2

Thank you for your replies.
No luck detecting it with VEH Debugger.
The game is a 3D single-player PC game from 2005.
I attempted to manually track the address being read, but it seems to occur randomly - usually from within d3d9.dll instructions.
Like an interrupt I'm not seeing, or keep missing.

If it is GPU memory, does that mean CE cannot track it? (Or perhaps there is no point - if it's the end of the line).
It's a word that gets written in the read/write memory in the 0AB00000 to 0ADFFFFF range.
It gets read as a 16-bit signed int (short) - which causes an overflow in 4K as screen-width * 10 is higher than SHRT_MAX.