Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I have fond memories of a tool for Acorn RISC OS computers called "The Hacker", later "Desktop Hacker", the website for which astonishingly still exists: http://www.doggysoft.co.uk/cheat.html

It worked very much like the examples given in the linked article, except you had to find the memory locations yourself, in most cases. So for example, if you wanted to find a cheat for extra lives, you'd start the game, drop out into the "Hacker" tool, search memory for "3", then lose a life, then search the results for "2", and test anything that was left by modifying it. Fun stuff.

View on HN

That was an amazingly capable bit of software, sold as a games cheat but the best debugger for RISC OS. I learned so much ARM assembler with it, and also how floppy disc copy protection worked :) It was like having the whole OS in a a virtual machine.

Not only does the website still exist, so does RISC OS. And it's free.

That's right, if you've got a Raspberry Pi or other RISC computer on your hands, you can re-live the 90's once again, and emulate the 80's from within it.

Have fun.

For those lazy among us:

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi

Yeah I've tinkered with it. RISC OS has some huge limitations in the 21st century, most notably, no multithreading, so you can never use more than a single core. On top of that 32-bit only (and 26-bit software from the 90s crashes), no IPv6, tiny fixed-size icons... sadly, the OS is dating rapidly.

There are some efforts to bring it into the modern era.

There's an app call scanmem (in Ubuntu repos) that does this. I used it to win at CandyCrush a few years back. Doing an `apt search` I see there's a GUI for it too. Seemingly works just as you describe.

On Windows, there's Cheat Engine[0]

[0]: http://www.cheatengine.org/

Cheat Engine is an extremely capable tool too, has lots of reverse engineering features, including a debugger and pointer searching tools, a blue-pill style hypervizor to modify memory undetectably and a very powerful assembly level patcher. Oh, and it's all open source. Seriously nice stuff.

Thank you for this. That program is so nice I think I might even abandon more traditional tools like OllyDbg, since this seems more targeted towards what I usually do with them, anyway.

Later versions of the game genie did this too -- they had enough internal memory to make a full copy of the console's memory to do the diffing against.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com