Cheat Engine 6.4 Tutorial Part 3: Finding Problematic Values

In this video, I run through finding multiple values in a game (e.g., health, coins, lives, etc.). I run into a snag when trying to find one of the values, and it was a prime scenario to show you how much digging is sometimes required to find the value you're looking for.

I use an NES emulator and an M.C. Kids ROM in this example. Please rate/comment/subscribe and feel free to let me know if there's anything in particular that you'd like to see! Thanks for watching. =)

[MulleDK]

In case anyone's interested, the reason for the Ms being "weird" is because they're stored as 2 nibbles (4 bits) instead of 1 byte.
4 bits for each digit. 9 is 1001 binary, so to make both digits 9, the value needs to be 10011001 (Or 0x99 hex / 153 decimal).
For 72, the byte needs to be 01110010 binary (or 0x72 hex / 114 decimal).

[mattharber]

Thank you for showing "mistakes"; It's incredibly helpful for beginners when troubleshooting!

[alkaliemetall]

Good video. The m's are represented in hex. So 99 hex is 153 in decimal. Cheers

[RonRay]

Thanks for all your Cheat Engine videos Stephen. You're one smart dude! 
You've helped me to understand enough of Cheat Engine to actually "use" it to make my gaming more 'interesting'. I don't understand all that you've explained, but then my age has a little something to do with that (65 years)... But then again, I never was as smart as you are. (at least I'm smart enough to admit that.)   :)  
Anyway, I just wanted to tell how much you've helped me and evidently, many others out here. 
Looking forward to more in this series.

[warstt]

Hey man, I know this video is pretty old, but I just wanted to thank you for posting this video series. I tried to imply some of your techniques into offline survival mode in Modern Warfare 3, which got insane very quickly. Also: for anyone who wants to hack online games: if it is a popular AAA game, you WILL get banned, no doubt about it, but if it is a crappy flash game, then by all means have fun with it, as long as you aren't harming anyone. :)

[StephenChapman]

Hey, Joseph. I'll be talking about this very thing in my next video (posting it this week) regarding pointer scanning. It's a complex issue initially (it certainly was for me), but I think I've come up with some good analogies to help people understand it more. Overall, it's more work, but once you find what's called the "base address, " you won't have to search for it again (unless a patch/update/DLC is release, which means you'll have to do the process again). Anyway, more on this soon!

[PsFlux]

Insanely helpful, turned out the value I was looking for was a float.

[ellisbosold]

I wanted to thank you Stephen because I am learning to not become such a skid, and will soon be able to contribute to places like vermillion and mpgh. You are very helpful

[Tysman]

The 17 is a display code you wanna find the internal code that writes to the display code. Possibly it's encrypted so will look like a very large value

[hitwalkhook]

When you have watched half of the pointers and you look at 10:00 and see that "yeah, you will explain it well like you did all this time!"
Am i the only one who watches cheat engine videos like movies? :D

[kadenlong]

with these old nintendo games, once you find your health value, go into the memory viewer and you might be able to find some other values close by like the m's. He has a video on this!

[uribh]

thank you very much your videos are incredible and learned a lot

[theyhaventfedmesince]

Not even just that. sometimes games would just make you do calculation to find the values. Reminded me of most games in RPGM VX Ace engine. To find the value you'd have to double it and plus one. So if you have like 5 potions, the one you'd scan would be 5x2+1.

[chuck]

yeah 153 in hex calculator is 99.  take a value that seems out of place but corresponds to the value your looking for.  type the number then convert it to hex. then it will work out.  great video!

[christiandesmarais]

hey stephen! i just wanted to say a big thank you because your videos are amazing!!

[Gremio]

@OverlordManny I was just going to post something similar to that. However, it's not really treating it or interpreting it is a "hexadecimal" value. It's getting the value for each decimal digit from 4 bit chunks (similar to the way we represent hexadecimal). It doesn't use, or expect at least, A (1010), B, ..., F. 153 = 10011001 or if you split it in half 1001 = 9, 1001 = 9. Just wanted to clear that up; the way you said the game read directly from the hex was misleading. More than likely there's nothing in the code that really understands the concept of a hexadecimal numerical system. that's just something we use to condense how we read the 1s and 0s under the hood. Not really sure why they would do it this way unless there's a 4 bit ALU in this system.

[tarantularose]

i remember a while ago, an address i found associated with health changed and became useless upon death in a game, so i'm not sure the assumption you made in this vid is the best one to make

[russneho]

This was SUCH a good video, really learnt a lot. Thanks heaps

[marccoleman]

so the M on screen is represented in hex, thanx for these they help alot, im working through your vids, and im building towards more and more advanced games.

[nathandaniel]

For a different game, I searched for unknown value on 'all' and got about 470 million results, I then scanned for unchanged values and the number somehow rose to about a billion.