Memory hacking newbie
Talked to a friend today about the game Dwarf Fortress and the progress its visualizer Stonesense is making. Dwarf Fortress is not open source, Stonesense uses some memory hacking techniques to read the state of the game world and render it. Memory hacking is, in my eyes, a dark and arcane art. Theres that mythical feel to it. Probably due to my lack of knowledge about it.
Ive been at it a few times, trying to change that. The conversation today sparked my interest yet again and I downloaded a much simplier program this time, with a nice builtin tutorial and everything. Maybe I was aiming to high in my earlier attempts.
A screenshot of Cheat Engine:
I got all the way to step 8 in the tutorial. The lesson in that tutorial was how to handle multi level pointers. A bit to big of a hazzle I felt. Besides, there are only 9 steps, I want to save some fun.
Also I wanted to try this out for real! So I started up the Minesweeper game found in Windows. Had no luck modifying the number of mines left. Might be because my Windows 7 install is 64bit. Or that its a function writing to that variable (now that Im writing this, I realize that I forgot to check that). In the screenshot above you see me attacking the game, with the wikipedia assembly reference in the background.
My ultimate goal would be to gather enough knowledge and experince in this to be able to help the memory hackers making Stonesense possible. 
Hallonduell said,
February 11, 2010 at 00:36
Memory hacking, it’s got damn annoyying when you are making global-highscore-webgames >.<
mizipzor said,
February 11, 2010 at 01:47
Funny you said that, every third post or so in the Cheat Engine forums are from users that want to cheat in Facebook games. >.< Doing a search on “Facebook” in the forums turns up some funny results. Cheating in those games has nothing to do with memory hacking, its SQL injections if something and thats down right illegal. Besides, the challenge of tampering with a game should be the fun part all in itself. Not the part when you look at your health bar and marvel at the fact that you now have one million health points. Like… Yay? >.<
Hallonduell said,
February 11, 2010 at 09:49
Yeah it’s quite a difference between making a graphical client to dwarf fortress and memory hack to get the highscore UINTMAX or freeze your health in a multiplayergame.
So use your dark arts for good, not for bad!
2010 in review « Mizipzor's Weblog said,
January 6, 2011 at 23:39
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