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LunaMoo · 10-08-2023, 01:57 AM

Personally I found 60 fps patches an interesting project at the start, but the further it went the more time consuming it become with less and less satisfaction from being a part of it.

CWCheat scene isn't dying. To create cheats you can just use tools to search through memory that can store and compare the results, that way you search for the variables and then can modify and/or freeze them to create some basic cheats like giving a player lots of money or setting his HP to max value. To create better cheats you need someone that understands low level programming and instead of forcing the money or hp value, that person can just change game shops to not use money at all or change the game to disable any incoming damage, or be less cheaty and just add collected money multiplier and hp regeneration over time or something alike.

Most people coming from the PSP times that created cheats didn't had tools nor knowledge to do the latter so "CWCheat scene" was just a bunch of people posting really basic and boring cheats without understanding much about how games works and how to modify that, that scene had people calling themselves pros and legends for the sole sake of using lame code types that tried to replace programming and the end results were always awful to the point of having to refresh the cheat faster than the game could to even make it work(which is just wasteful). If that scene died, it deserved it's fate, but CWCheat is just a popular format for memory patches and as long as it exists in PPSSPP it'll continue to be alive.

PSP games through emulation gained and still gain new people ocassionally doing better cheats and mods for them, it's no longer about simple HP freeze, but about patching fps, adding ultra widescreen support, adding right analog stick support or just analog range to games never using it before, adding variable width latin fonts and fan translating games, there's a lot of stuff happening along with much better working cheats than it was with the past, some of those people do a lot of stuff around the net for free either to learn stuff, as their hobby for fun or even because they feel anxiety and have problems with normal human interactions while still wanting to be part of some group, but all of those things aren't static, lives change, people change and you can't expect to see people just doing one thing forever. PPSSPP forums became mostly dead at some point due to spam bots taking over, even now when stuff get's verificated by humans, I'd say over half of the new posts around here are just AI generated texts or bots that use parts or whole copies of old posts, but just because forums are dead, it doesn't mean people died with it, github still has same faces from all around the world.
About PPSSPP's discord, I was invited there at some point or maybe a bunch of times, but I like to sit when I have time and feel like it then read or write something, used discord only a few times to play online to me it feels more like a chat which in my mind requiring much more attention which I can't offer if I want to have any time for myself and not feel like having a secondary job/fiancée, one of each is enough for me.

Anyway PSP cheating/modding will not die nor it is on a way to die, it's much simpler than doing the same thing for PC games and this just grows, there's probably a lot more people with enough knowledge to bypass anti tamper techniques(things like denuvo for example) in the PC cheating scene than it is in the PC cracking scene right now and looking at PSP games tends to be like getting back in time where everything was simpler.

Does it mean all the PSP games will get some cool patches and cheats? Nah, it's an old handheld, most of games in it's library are easier, slower, way uglier and don't offer anything which you wouldn't have XXXX different more modern versions of. MH games from PSP are way worse than for example MHW, same can be said about pretty much any franchise, God Eater 2? It's not even emulated properly with nobody yet figuring out the whole problem it has while definitive versions of the game GE2RB is often sold on steam bundled with GER at a price of a fastfood. Some turn based niche war game with a name that old player like me had to google up is between not needing to most people not caring, DBZ as a franchise just has soo many games with every single one of them hugely lacking in some regards that it also isn't something that people tend to play forever and get back to it's old iterations.
The point I'm trying to make here is that you need a hardcore fan to do whatever people care to do with those games, hardcore to the point of learning programming for the sake of enhancing his experience. You have all the content online, just search for it like everyone before you, learning to find knowledge is as commonly teached in higher education much more important than learning the knowledge as the latter changes and you need to find new knowledge and adapt as you live.

Why do you think almost nobody can reverse engineer a cheat, pretty much anyone can... but the word reverse engineering includes learning and not just following step by step guides and saying there's not enough resource out there to learn from which is not true. CWCheat formatting of some more complex cheats make things hard to debug and understand, but only bad cheats made by noobs back in the PSP era are using those so might as well just not bother, but even if you want to understand it just look for CWCheat code types online(for example look for "0xY code type cwc" where Y will be the number you find in the code line you're trying to understand) or read the code inside PPSSPP's cheat parser and you will understand the syntax.

What you need to look up is "MIPS opcodes", "low level programming", "assembly", "debugging", "algorithms" those are keywords you want to google for, it really isn't art, just math and programming.

I explained tons of times how to search through PSP memory in PPSSPP and how to calculate the address for cwcheat to the point of getting bored and writing a cwcheat table with simple scripts that does it automatically, it's in the link from my signature. Might be outdated when used with latest versions of PPSSPP as I didn't really tested it for a while and pattern scan probably needs an update, but you can always download older PPSSPP version to use it with until I find time and will to do it. Here's some older posts about creating CWCheats and calculating things from before PPSSPP was even telling you it's base address 1, 2, but you'll easily find much more of lenghty posts and topics around here explaining same things over and over at different stage of PPSSPP developement at least before I created that cheat table from my signature.

The fps cheat.db is something I never supported due to it sharing a lot of early and broken work, might even include outdated versions of some patches that were improved afterwards. I'm overally not a fan of such collective cheat databases of any kind as they don't grow by having a huge team of testers playing the game from start to finish with a cheat ensuring they only get something that works well, but instead one or few people who copy paste anything they find online with little to no testing and call it a day.

There are generally two kinds of games when it comes to FPS patches. Those that are either using variable refresh rate or are tied to 60 fps, but afterwards get internal frameskipping for performance reasons(PSP is battery operated and game that you can play for 2-4 hours is way more playable than a game you can play for 1 hour) and games where timing of everything is tied to actual framerate. In the first type all you need to do is remove that internal frameskipping, in the latter you also have to do that, but in addition you have to correct all the timings. Those are often taking some common floating point value in equation that feels like just waiting to be patched, however one thing many people are forgetting or not know is that compilers optimize things and if a constant value is shared between what you want to patch and what you don't want to touch, this might require much more effort or will break stuff, so majority of FPS patches are unfinished and tend to break games or change things not immediately seen in a way that ultimately provides inferior experience. Saying that, those FPS patches outside of a few simpler, perfectly working cases are really just not worth using or creating new ones and definitely not something to start learning from.