Cheat Engine

[C1aref5]

Before we begin, let's laugh a little

"DOS addresses only 1 MB of RAM because we cannot imagine any applications needing more" Microsoft 1980

I don't think it's that significant." - Tandy president John Roach on IBM PC

How to make instant build tutorial


I wrote this tutorial in order to show you how to make instant build for Age of empires but this will apply to virtually any game imaginable. Because of a great demand I will write how to make reveal map and skip mission options too.


WHAT WE NEED ?
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- Cheat Engine ( the best tool, can't live without it )
- Patience


To make an instant build cheat we have to find out the code that cares(calculates) how long something will be building.

There are many possibilities how to find it out. I will explain just one of them, which worked fine with me. Now if we think a little, there should be some parameter in memory that is increasing or decreasing(depends on the game) during the build. We are going to find it out.

So let's start building something. Now during building process we have to find all the memory locations which are decreasing or increasing. First we will try to find out those which are decreasing. In the game we start building Barracks and as soon as it starts we pause the game(we press ESC),
ALT+TAB to Cheat Engine choose the process of Age of empires 2 and start searching the locations. Then ALT+TAB back to the game, unpause and wait a little. Back ALT+TAB to Cheat Engine and use the -has decreased- option to search only those memory locations which were decreased since the last search.

Then back to the game... we need to repeat doing this till we don't find only one or few locations.

In Cheat Engine we can also use other options like -has decreased by Less than %- which can be very useful but I won't explain them here.

OK, everything should come well and we find the location(by me is 88FCEEC).

Let's check it out.

Back to the game and go back to Cheat Engine. Be sure that we are in game and not in some other process. Let's put a breakpoint on the address 8FCEEC and ALT+TAB to return to the game. Cheat Engine should have addresses for us.

We should see something like this:

:004B9529 mov ecx, dword ptr [esi+68]
:004B952C push edi
:004B952D call 004E5470
:004B9532 mov eax, dword ptr [esi+5C]
:004B9535 mov [esi+58], 00
:004B9539 sub eax, edi <-this decrease our counter
:004B953B mov dword ptr [esi+5C], eax
:004B953E cmp dword ptr [esi+24], 00000036 <---interesting
:004B9542 jne 004B9574


Hm, let's fix it !!! Instead of sub eax, edi let's modify it by sub eax,eax ! In this way we will decrease the counter so it should build the thing instantly.

Let's modify it, disable all breakpoints and back to the game. What?? #%&%#& Nothing happen.

But don't give up, let's check that cmp at the 004B953E. Seems it's comparing the location pointed to [esi+24] with 36 hex. Let's check it out,


:004B94BF 8B4638 mov eax, dword ptr [esi+38]
:004B94C2 8B5624 mov edx, dword ptr [esi+24]
:004B94C5 03D0 add edx, eax
:004B94C7 895624 mov dword ptr [esi+24], edx
:004B94CA A15453A300 mov eax, dword ptr [00A35354]
:004B94CF 8B54240C mov edx, dword ptr [esp+0C]

Hmm, we can see that here is some other counter, which increases something.

And when it reaches 0x36 it is done. OK, let's modify the code in this way then:


mov edx, 36
nop //this 3 additional nops are because this instruction is
nop //shorter than that we've replaced
nop
mov dword ptr [esi+24], edx

OK, disable all breakpoints and let's go back to the game. YES, IT WORKS!!!!

We have the instant build. Now we only need to make a trainer that will modify the code when we press a button.

And that's all that has to be done. Easy isn't it ?



Please let me know if you like and want me to write more tutorials


From the heart of the winners