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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> emulate a PCIe card using another device

The other existing solution to this is FPGA cards: https://www.fpgadeveloper.com/list-of-fpga-dev-boards-for-pc... - note the wide spread in price. You then also have to deal with FPGA tooling. The benefit is much better timing.

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Indeed, and even then, there's some sw-hw-codesign stuff that kinda helps you do what PCIem does but it's usually really pricey; so I kinda thought it'd be a good thing to have for free.

PCIe prototyping is usually not something super straightforward if you don't want to pay hefty sums IME.

The "DMA cards" used for video game cheating are generic PCIe cards and (at least the one I got) comes with open documentation (schematics, example projects etc).

What's this? Hardware specifically for game cheating? Got any links?

Direct Memory Access (DMA) via PCI-e bypasses anti-cheat in the OS because the OS doesn't see the call to read or write the memory. There's no process to spy on, weird drivers, system calls, etc. You can imagine that maybe the anticheat could detect writes that perform a cheat by this method, but it has zero chance of detecting a wallhack style cheat that just reads memory. This is getting to be less relevant with modern OSs, though. Window 11 has IOMMU which only allows DMA to a given memory region defined per device. I think it should be impossible to do this on win11.

Don't you still need a driver to control the DMA card to tell it what to do with the memory?

If you search “DMA card”, there’s a lot of DMA cards all over the internet.

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