Cheat Engine

[Ice745]

Edited: Answered some of my own questions with trial and many error

I am going to make my first custom scan, unfortunately I am unable to say what it is for.

However, it will be based on a text search; therefore, I must use scantext to get the user input request.

Which memory space does the custom scan execute in, Cheat Engine's, or the target application's?

Second question (if the custom scan is run in Cheat Engine's memory space), how much of the target applications memory after the current address in the scan is copied to the pointer given?

Third question, is the scantext 8-bit or 16-bit characters?

Fourth question, is it at all possible to allow Cheat Engine to debug our search routines? I program it, get an error, then have to cut out code blocks until I find where. It'd be nice if we could step through the assembled scan routine in action so we can see what's going on.

Thank you for your time!

Edit 2:
I figured out most of my access errors were due do my assumption that registers were free for use. Like a sloppy programmer I just altered eax, ebx, esi, and edi without pushing and popping. I assumed CE had a pushad before it ran my search routine.

Now using pushad, and popad I have an almost working routine. The weird error I get now though is "Out of memory." I sometimes get this when I set the variablesize to 000000FF. If I set it to 7f, scan. Edit it back to FF, do a new scan and repeat, the error doesn't appear. And closing CE and reloading it allows the FF size without any problems until it appears again. So far the first occurance of this error seems to be at random.

I have 2GB RAM. CE is taking 50mb at the time, and the target app about 100 mb.

[Dark Byte]

[Ice745]

Thank you for your reply, and of course for making Cheat Engine.

The information was very helpful.

I do have a dual core processor, so I will try setting the affinity.

On a final thought, I have a question/suggestion:
Is it possible to set a value, maybe in AH, that would tell Cheat Engine which basic type (no type, int, float, double, text, hex array, etc) to show the results in the result window (which would then automatically be assigned when adding each result to the cheat table). It's more of a convenience than necessity. Otherwise it just lists the address found.

In example, say (no type) is 0; and the search ends with ax = 0001, the result would be added with just the address, like it is now.
But if say (DWORD) is 4; and the search ends with ax = 0401, the result would be added with the address, and the value would interpret what's at the address as a DWORD.

In the case of text/hex array, variablesize could be used as the length.

Again, thank you for your time and patience!

[Dark Byte]

yes, for next version i'll do something like that.
Give a option to show as a default type, OR provide the option to let the writer of the custom script to provide a routine that converts the address given to a specific notation (So convert the bytes to a string yourself)