Cheat Engine

gir489

I'm using this: http://www.moddb.com/mods/vice-city-stories-pc-edition downloaded from a torrent and updated to 3.0 with the internal updater.

Every time I launch CheatEngine, the game immediately shuts down, before I can even trap it. It seems even just having cheat engine in the title of a fake window causes it to do it. Any ideas?

I don't see anything like window scanning or basic API debugger checks, but I didn't look at it in IDA for too long. It looks almost the same as gta-sa.exe.

Dark Byte · Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 4:42 am Post subject:

I'm not sure if any of these methods work but execute this lua function before opening the game:

gir489 · Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 9:20 am Post subject:

It also does it to IDA and OllyDbg. Trying to launch it within OllyDbg or IDA's debuger leads nowhere. It just ends up in NTDLL and never comes back to gta-vcs.exe.

So, I think it's detecting something else that I can't see.

I'll try setting the title and hexicle editing CE to see if I can get it to start without tripping up the EXE.

I think it's detecting something in the IAT of the program that it doesn't like.

gir489 · Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 11:01 pm Post subject:

I got it working. I stopped treating this piece of shit like a game, and started treating it like malware. Pooped on it in 2 minutes once I flipped over to malware mode. It's using a simple signature scan from VCSPC.dll which is manually mapped in. It has a blacklist of process signatures it doesn't like, and if it detects one, it shuts down. That's fuck all and good, until I sandbox your ass, and apply CheatEngine with a one way debugger. Get #shrekt.

http://www.mediafire.com/view/85xjuzs5m2rbkru/gta-vcs+2014-09-19+23-02-46-98.jpg
http://www.mediafire.com/view/qmxj9vso4y6l8ls/GTAVCS.png

I'd make a trainer, but it requires the user to have Sandboxie to work, or patch the EXE. Neither of those are intuitive. So I'll just make myself a happy little trainer for myself.