Cheat Engine

[TheNerdling]

So I've had luck either finding a cheat table or being able to figure out how to do what I want when messing around with games, until now.

Master of Magic is an old DOS game that I have to run through DosBox (Version 0.74-2). It's available on Good Old Games and you can find free versions online if you look.

At the beginning of the game you can make a custom wizard with their own perks and how much knowledge they have about different schools of magic (both are chosen based on a limited amount of points/picks that you get). This is what I am trying to change. I'm wanting to increase the number of picks to futz about with.

It was easy to find a Byte, 2 Byte, and String value that corresponded to the remaining amount of picks. But if I tried to freeze any/all of them, those values wouldn't change or would flicker from the frozen number to changed number, and in game the number of picks would update correctly, preventing me from selecting more perks than by default allowed.

Did some searching online and found this youtube video (Can't post full URLS: watch?v=mIR-aBR8ng4) that states you need to find a vmem base amount in order to find the pointers for DosBox games. Using the technique they did I found a vmem base of 0x01D1ABFC

From there I was able to find the offset for the pointer to my 2 byte address, added it manually, so now I have a byte/2byte/string address with the correct value, and a pointer to the 2byte address showing the correct value. I tried freezing the pointer, which just crashed DosBox when I tried to select anything.

Any debuggers I try to attach (what writes/accesses this address/pointer) don't work correctly, like they would with non-DosBox games

Any suggestions/knowledge/advice/tutorials?

[TheyCallMeTim13]

May be someone with experience with DosBox can chime in.
But if you just started learning, don't do it with emulators; It's like learning to camp for the first time, but in Antarctica.