CwCheat Support

[Sanji Himura]

I'm going to post this here for simplicity's sake. I finally figured out how to create cwcheats using Cheat Engine for the PPSSPP emulator. Here is a brief guide on how I did it. If ANYTHING at all needs elaborating, please do not hesitate to PM me about it.

Also note that this guide will not work in all cases (I'm looking at you sports games). Some PSP games have what is called dynamic memory, and to the best of my knowledge, dynamic memory is:

LunaMoo Wrote:You can only recognize them by trying to find some variable in memory and have it being at different address. It might change after each reload, but might also change between levels/stages and always be same for particular place in game.

How hard it is to deal with it? Well it all depends on experience and knowledge.

If a person doesn't know asm it will really depend on his experience and on how deep pointer particular game needs, in most games it's at least like 4-5 levels which means you will have to find pointer to a pointer, pointer to a pointer you just found and soo on. There are better ways to deal with it than finding pointers.

That said, if you are looking for a basic guide to help you get started, then this is it.

Game Featured: Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles (USA version)
Code Featured: Max hearts in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Clarification: Not infinite Hearts)
Items needed: Notepad and Hex calculator

1. After obtaining and installing Cheat Engine, open the emulator without loading a game and Cheat Engine.
2. Load the game that you are searching for cheats for and immediately press F8. This pauses the emulator.
3. Open the Log Console, and you will notice that there will be some activity on the console. You will want to search for the following line of text (Featured game shown here):

Quote:Memmap.cpp:338 I[MM]: Memory system initialized. RAM at 000000C3EEC70000

3b. We can safely ignore the first six zeroes in the address for the purposes of the next steps. Just don't forget to input them in Cheat Engine later.

4. Now we must calculate the actual ROM. Using a Hex calculator, add 800000 to the RAM address that you just saw. The 800000 in PPSSPP is actually PSP memory, and can't be physically searched as far as cwcheats are concerned. The result of the math problem is the start of User memory, in other words the ROM memory. [Note: If you use the search function in ZSNES, it actually searches the user memory to find codes.]

Result: [C3EEC70000+800000] = C3EF470000

4b. Now we need to calculate the end of the ROM. Using the previous result, add either 1800000 (if you are searching by way of a PSP-1000 emulation) or 3800000 (if you are using the PSP-2000/3000 setting in your emulator). For the sake of this guide, I will be using the PSP-1000 emulation setting:

Result: [C3EF470000+1800000] = C3F0C70000

[optional: If you have already linked Cheat Engine (see step 5) to the PPSSPP process, input the results into the Memory Scan address start (4a) and end (4b).]

5. Inside Cheat Engine, click the glowing box on the left. This will open up a process list. Find PPSSPP on that list.

6. Input the results from (4a) and (4b) into the start and end addresses, remember to fill in the six zeroes in both addresses that I told you to ignore earlier.

6b. If you are unsure how many bytes your code will eventually have, use the drop down menu and select ALL.

7. In your game, find the value that you wish to search for inside Cheat Engine and search for it. In the featured game example, my value is 143, and my first search yielded 18,639 results.

8. Modify the value in any shape or form and input the result into Cheat Engine. Be sure to click the Next Scan button instead of New Scan, or else you will lose all your progress and have to start over from step 7.

Result address: C3EFDD3F40

Phase 2: Format the address for cwcheat format.

9. Take the result from step 8 and subtract the ROM Start address in a Hex calculator. The result will be the cwcheat address.

Result: [C3EFDD3F40-C3EF470000] = 963F40

10. Now we need to determine, in hex, what the value that you want the game to display. In the example, I want 999 hearts maximum, so in hex it is 3E7 as the display value. In cwcheat it is 0x000003E7. We have half the code already.

11. Using the result in step 9, we need to determine what size bit that the code requires. Your options are 0x0 (for an 8 bit code), 0x1 for 16 bit codes and finally 0x2 for a 32 bit code. Personally, this requires a bit of experimentation, but in this case, the address portion of the code in the example is 0x10963F40

Congratulations, you have discovered a cwcheat.

For Max hearts in Symphony of the Night portion of Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles:

_L 0x10963F40 0x000003E7