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Finding Cheat Codes For A Living

Posted by timothy on from the innate-not-inmate dept.

selan writes: "The Baltimore Sun has an article about the guys from GameShark who spend their time digging up cheat codes. 'For hours on end, hackers here squint over thousands of lines of numeric coding that translate to great feats of accomplishment on a video game.'" Good work, if you can get it.

2 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cheat Codes Origin by Tazzy531 · · Score: 5, Informative
    There's two different answers to this one:
    1) Companies insert cheat codes because like you said, they use it to test the games. The Second reason is that it is always a thrill by the player to find out about these cheat codes, either through a purposely well placed 'leak' by the company or by themselves. Thirdly, companies do make money on cheats. Some companies sell "player guides" that are filled with help and cheats on games. If there weren't any cheats, there would be no market for these player guides.

    2) Game Shark (according to the article) does not use the cheats made by the companies, although, I suspect that if they are reverse engineering it, they could view the cheats. But what they do is write/edit the RAM (memory) at given moments to enhance a feature. Let's say that in memory location 255, the game Mortal Kombat stores the maximum health of player 1. What the GameShark does is, instead of letting the game store 100% there, it writes in 500% (let's say) which gives you more health. Or another way would be to store -1 or something that the program doesn't expect.

    Here's why that would work: Let's say that the program says:
    while(player1life != 0) player1life--;
    With this, the player would never die.
    --


    _______________________________
    "I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
  2. On the PC... by Tom7 · · Score: 4, Informative


    Back in the DOS days, there was a program called "Gametools" that worked like a Game Shark for PC games. It was a whole lot more useful, though, because you could easily come up with codes yourself by searching through memory for interesting values as you played the game.

    (You could also use it to write cracks for your software. Some day, this kind of software will probably end up being illegal.)

    These days there are SoftICE and GDB, but programs are getting a whole lot bigger and more complicated. It's just not as fun...