The Cheat is designed with expert users in mind. The interface is tailored for rapid use, and it wastes few words in describing its functions. Nevertheless, the interface is simple and intuitive once you know a little bit about what is going on. New users should have little trouble in picking up the basics of cheating, and there are many resources available to you to help you get started. Here are some resources to check out:

Your main resource as a new user is this file. This is the most convenient place to get quick help because it is built right into The Cheat, and it points to all of the other resources. This file contains comprehensive information about using The Cheat and should be consulted before any other resources. This document is organized to maximize convenience and usefulness. It can be read straight-through from top to bottom if you have a lot of time on your hands, or you can refer to certain sections whenever you are faced with a question or problem.

Use the table of contents at the top of this page to jump to the sections which interest you. You can get back to the top of this page using the links labeled "top" which appear at the end of each section. I have also used a few typographical conventions to make the reading easier. Variable addresses and variable values will appear in this green mono font. I have also italicized user interface identifiers to help you follow instructions when they are given. For example, you might see "From the menu, choose Cheater -> Edit Variables, and set the New Value field to 128."

To do what it does, The Cheat accesses the memory of other applications. It first reads through the entire address space, searching for variables based on input you provide. Search results are then narrowed down by scanning the memory again after the value of the variable you are searching for has changed. After a few searches, there should only be one variable remaining (ideally). The Cheat will then allow you to change this variable to whatever you want. The rest of this document will focus on the best ways to find variables, since that is the trickiest part.

Mac OS X includes support for protected memory which disables programs from accessing the memory of the system and other programs. This causes a more stable system because faulty applications won't be able to trash the memory of other applications which could cause crashes and lockups. Since The Cheat is able to get around this protection, might this be bad for stability? Potentially, yes. However, The Cheat only changes the memory of other programs where you tell it to. If you are careful, your games should never crash. Furthermore, assuming you don't run The Cheat as root (which would be a Bad Thing), The Cheat will not be able to alter any system-critical processes, so it would actually be very difficult if not impossible to crash or mess up your system using The Cheat.

The process behind cheating is almost as old as computer games themselves. The idea is this: everything that a computer game "knows" is stored in memory. The advent of virtual memory has blurred the line between physical memory and hard disk space, but the distinction doesn't apply on a fundamental level. Given the fact that we know the game is storing what it knows in memory, and also assuming that it's possible to go in there and alter that memory behind the game's back, we can conclude that we have the ability to make the game do whatever we want, up to the limits put upon us by the game's code.

Simply put, cheating is altering the memory of a game in order to make it do what we want. It's time to define some other terms which will surely be used throughout this document and whenever you talk with someone about cheating.

The address space refers to all of the memory that a program is using. It is the memory that will be searched and changed. It is important to note that not all addresses in the address space are being used; you'll see why this is important when you learn abut changing variables.

A variable is analogous to a "variable" in mathematics. A variable has two components: an address and a value. The value is a storable concept, usually a number (i.e. 73, 0, and 73453.236 are all values). The address is a location in the address space where the value is stored. Given the mathematical expression X=56, the value is 56 and the address is X. It takes both the address and the value to define a variable.

Because of how computers are designed, an address will never be as simple as just X. An address for a computer is actually just a number which points to a location within a program's address space. Today's 32-bit computers can use addresses from 0 thru 2³²-1 (that's over four billion different addresses). A move toward 64-bit processing is occurring, although 32-bit programs on a 64-bit computer will still only be able to access 2³² addresses.

As has been mentioned in the introduction, the interface of The Cheat has been designed with experts in mind. It is relatively intuitive for people who have used a game trainer before and know how they work. Therefore, the best way to learn how to use The Cheat is to get to know the process involved in cheating games!

The strategy behind finding variables is to do a search when the variable you are looking for has its value changed to something (anything) else. When searching for variables, you always search for its value because it's the address which we don't know. The address could be virtually anything, and it doesn't really matter what it is. The value, on the other hand, we do usually know.

For example, assume I'm playing a first-person shooter, and the game displays how many bullets I have at the top of the screen. You know that somewhere in memory, the game is keeping track of that number with a variable. You know the value of the variable because its on the screen, but you don't know where in memory that variable resides. Using this basic example, here is what you would do in order to find the address of that variable.

At any convenient point in the game, just do a search for the current value of the ammunition variable. For example, if I had 16 bullets I would search for 16. The only problem is there will be thousands of variables in memory which also happen to have that same value. How do you know which variable refers to the ammunition? You won't until you narrow down your results by performing another search.

I would go back to the game and fire off a few bullets into space. Now I have 13 bullets. Now, by keeping your previous results in memory, you can compare only those results against this new value of 13; so just do another search for the value 13.

Each time you do a cross-search against the results you've obtained so far, your results will be narrowed down. Keep narrowing down the results until you can see which variable is the ammunition variable. You will be able to tell because you will see the value change as you shoot more bullets or pick up more ammunition.

There are actually several different types of variables that a game can use. You are going to have to know a little bit about how variables are stored in memory to understand the different types of variables. There are three basic types that The Cheat supports: integers, floating point numbers, and byte-streams.

The most common (and useful) variable type is the integer. An integer variable can only hold either positive or negative whole numbers. For example, -56, 0, 3, and 663453234223334 are all integers. There are two things you need to know about integers. First, an integer can be either signed or unsigned. An integer that is signed can have both positive and negative values. An unsigned integer on the other hand can only have positive values.

The other thing you need to know about integers is that there is a finite number of values that any integer can have, and the number of available values depends upon the sign of the integer and how many bits in memory the integer "takes up." If you are freaking out right about now, please DON'T PANIC! I wouldn't be covering this if it wasn't necessary, but you don't need to remember all of this at once. Take a few big breaths and relax. You can always refer back to this section if you didn't quite get it the first time.

The Cheat supports four different integer sizes: 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit. An 8-bit integer can hold 2⁸ different values, which works out to be 256 values. What those values can be depends on the sign of the integer. If you have an 8-bit signed integer, that variable can hold a number between (and including) -128 and 127, which works out to exactly 256 different values if you do the math. If you have an 8-bit unsigned integer, that variable can hold a number between (and including) 0 and 255, which also works out to 256 different values.

This concept can be extended to all integers. A 16-bit integer can hold one of 2¹⁶ (or 65536) values. If the 16-bit integer is signed, the values can range from -32768 to 32767; likewise a 16-bit unsigned integer has values that range from 0 to 65535.

Fortunately, when searching for integer variables, it is not always necessary for you to use the correct sign and integer size in order to find the variable you are looking for. For example, a 32-bit signed integer with a value of 1977 is actually equal to a 32-bit unsigned integer with the same value. A lot of the time you will only discover whether an integer is signed or unsigned after you have found it and are trying to change the value. For example, if you find a variable which you think is a signed integer, but it becomes a large positive number when you try to change it to a negative value, then you know it is actually unsigned. The distinction between signed and unsigned rarely needs to be considered while searching.

The next variable type is the floating point number. Like the integer, a floating point variable also has number values, but they can have fractional values. For example, -632.5, 0.0002, 636345.0, and 885.6234234423 are all floating point numbers. Floating points come in only two sizes: 32-bit (float) and 64-bit (double).

Searching for floating points is considerably different than searching for integers. For one thing, you have to use the correct size or you will not find the variable. For example, a float with a value of 7.0 does NOT equal a double with the same value. The only way to decide whether a floating point number is a float or a double is to look at the range of values the variable has. A double can hold twice as much as a float can, which is probably why it's called "double."

The last variable type is a stream of bytes. This is more commonly called an ASCII string. ASCII just refers to the fact that the byte-stream is actually a string with special encoding. In the case of an ASCII string, the encoded data consists of words and phrases. It can also consist of numbers, but while the numbers are encoded as an ASCII string, the computer does not recognize it as a number. To the computer, it's just a stream of bytes. It is because of this that an integer with a value of 765 does NOT equal an ASCII string encoded with the same value.

You will probably never use an ASCII string search when you are searching for number values. The types of variables the ASCII string search finds are words, like perhaps the name of your character.

Let's revisit our made-up first-person shooter for the time being. We now want to find the health variable so we can increase our health whenever we get low. Our health is displayed along the bottom of the screen as a progress bar. The bar shrinks when we get shot and grows when we pick up first aid kits. The problem is that a progress bar doesn't give us anything we can directly search for. In this case, we don't know the address or the value of the variable we are looking for. We don't even know what type of variable it is! How on earth are we supposed to find it!?

In order to find such a beast, we may have to employ some wholesome guess-and-check techniques. The first step is to figure out or guess which type of variable is running the progress bar. It almost definitely is NOT an ASCII string; it is very likely a number of some sort. It could be an integer with a built-in range (say, 0 means no health and 100 means full health). It could also be a floating point number with a range from 0.0 to 1.0. There are many other possibilities as well. The only way to find out the variable type is to try one and see if you can find the variable. If you can't then try another type. In this case, I would probably try an integer search first.

There is still a problem, though. We still don't know what value to search for! As it turns out, The Cheat has support for searching with different operators. Operators take two values and tell you different things depending upon the operator. There are four operators: equal, not equal, less than, and greater than.

The equal operator records a hit if the value in memory is equal to the search value. You would use this search operator if you knew the value of the variable you were looking for. The same is true for the not equal operator. As you would expect, a hit is recorded each time the value in memory does not equal the search value.

The other two operators are most helpful in finding variable of which we don't know the value. The less than operator records a hit for every value in memory that is numerically less than the search value. I trust you can figure out what the greater than operator does. It is important to note that these operators compare the numerical value of variables. An ASCII string does not have a numerical value and can therefore not be used with these operators. Integers and floating points are fair game, however.

Let's put these operators to good use in our hypothetical first-person shooter. We have a health bar which is about half full (or half empty if you prefer). We don't know what the value is, but we do know that whatever it is, it's probably greater than zero. So we do a greater than search with the value 0, and we get a couple hundred thousand results.

Recall that in order to find the variable, the value needs to change. So we go back to the game and pick up a first aid kit, and the health bar grows like it's supposed to. Notice that we are faced with another problem. We only know two things. The first thing we know is that the value is still greater than zero, but that doesn't help us because most of the variables that our first search found are probably still positive, too. The other thing we know is that whatever the value is, it is now greater than what is was when we first searched. This leads us to another handy tool.

The Cheat has the ability to perform searches based on previous values. Instead of providing a search value to compare against, just use Last Value. In the first-person shooter example, do a "greater than last value" search and The Cheat will return the variables from our previous results which have increased since our last search.

Now get back to the game and blow yourself up so the health bar shrinks. You will now want to do a "less than last value" search. Repeat in this fashion to narrow down your results. That's all there is to it! If we were not able to find the variable this way, remember that we could still try a floating point search.

That's all there is to searching. You should be able to find almost any variable using the techniques described in this section. Keep in mind that some variables are a lot trickier than others. If you are an impatient person, it's alright to consider cheating something similar to therapy. Some variables will take a long time to find, but the reward is usually justification enough.

Once you have successfully searched and found a variable, the worst part is far, far behind you. Changing variables hardly needs its own section; there really isn't much to it. Basically you just provide the new value to give to the variable, and apply the cheat. There are a few things related to changing variables which should be discussed, however.

Variables which are added to the variable list are presented in a table which displays the type of variable it is, its address, and the value which is to be given to the variable when you apply the cheat. Managing these variables is fairly simple. You can enable and disable them. Disabled variables are not changed when the cheat is applied. You can also copy and paste variables between sessions. There is a batch edit command which lets you edit multiple variables at the same time. Of course, you can also delete variables.

You can also save "cheat" files if you want to save variables for use later. Be careful, however. Variables are NOT guaranteed to have the same address all of the time. Some variables always have the same address and some do not. It is impossible to tell which variables will have changing addresses, so you should do multiple searches for that variable at different times to see if it moves. The variable you originally found will NOT work if it has moved and has a different address. If it does move, the only way to use that variable is to search for it again.

If you do save a "cheat" to file, information about the program being cheated is also saved. You can also change the title of the window and give a short description about the cheat if you wish.

Finally, The Cheat can also apply cheats at specified time intervals. This is useful when you want to keep a variable constant. For example, in my first-person shooter, I could tell The Cheat to set the health at maximum every second. This has effectively provided me with a God-mode. Since multiple variables can be changed for the same cheat, I could also do the same thing for my ammunition. Now I can't be killed, and I can't run out of bullets. Now all you need is to find a variable that allows you to walk through locked doors, and you're set!

This section includes descriptions of all the non-obvious menu items you'll see in The Cheat.

Cheater -> Cheat Properties… ⌘I activates a sheet which allows you to change the title of the session window and the cheat description. This menu item is only available if a cheat session is active.

Cheater -> Pause Target ⌘P uses the kill command to halt execution of the program being cheated. In theory, this is a great way to pause your game without switching back and forth between the game and The Cheat. In reality, it is sometimes better just to use the game's built-in pause feature.

Cheater -> Clear Search ⌘⌫ is a shortcut way to clear the current search. You can use this command in either Search or Cheat Modes. It accomplishes the same thing as pushing the Clear Search button on the session window.

Cheater -> Add New Variable is a submenu which contains menu items which will add certain types of blank variables. You can then edit the address and values of these new variables. Most of the time you will find variables by searching for them.

Cheater -> Dump Memory activates the memory dump tool which allows you to "dump" a program's memory to a file. Once in file form, you can use your preferred file comparison tools and whatnot for some advanced cheating.

Cheater -> Edit Variables ⌘↩ provides you with a way to edit a batch of variables instead of just one at a time.

Other Server… ⌘K appears inside the server popup menu on session windows. It activates a sheet which allows you to enter the address and port of a cheat server to connect to.

The Cheat does support a certain level of customizability. This section describes what can be changed. All of these settings can be changed by choosing the Preferences menu item, which is in the usual place.

The general settings effect mostly user interface and behavioral issues. By default, The Cheat shows a very brief fade effect while switching between Search and Cheat Mode. You can choose to disable this. You can also choose to make The Cheat's session windows stay on top of other windows on the screen. Unfortunately, full-screen games will cover the entire screen regardless of this setting.

By default, The Cheat will automatically switch to Cheat Mode whenever you add variables to be cheated. You can change this setting. You can also tell The Cheat not to automatically start editing variables that are added to the Cheat Mode table of variables. The Cheat is also set up to prompt you to save cheat files, and you can turn this off.

The settings which effect the search results table allow you to turn off value-updating so you will not see current values. The Cheat will only show you what the value was during the last search. You can also specify how often the values are refreshed. Lastly, you can specify how many results to show in the table. The Cheat will display the first results it gets up to that limit.

The Update feature of The Cheat helps you keep track of new versions of The Cheat when they are made available. You can check the availability of new updates and you can also tell The Cheat to automatically check this for you every time it starts up.

It's the classic cheater's horror story: you want to cheat a certain game, but you soon realize that the game only has a full-screen mode. Bad luck, mate. Or is it?

Well, it is possible to cheat games which won't allow you to switch out of full-screen. The good news is that it's just as easy as cheating a windowed game, but you knew there was a catch didn't you? Of course there is! You do have to have two networked computers capable of running The Cheat.

The feature is affectionately known as remote cheating, and if you're a cheater with at least two computers with The Cheat, remote cheating is your new best friend.

In order for remote cheating to work, The Cheat comes with a built-in cheat server. It's like a web server, only it serves... cheats! Okay, bad analogy. The point is that the cheat server needs to be running in order to allow other computers on your network to connect. The server is off by default, so you will need to turn it on from the Server pane on the Preferences window.

Once the server is started, you can see the connections which are made in the connection table. It will show you the IP address which the client is connected through as well as how much data the client is transferring. You can disconnect clients by selecting them in the table and pressing the delete key on the keyboard.

If you can't get the cheat server to start, the most likely problem is that you are trying to bind to a port that is already in use on your computer. Try a different port to see if that works. If it does then just keep using that port. Sometimes you might also get an informational dialog that tells you that the server was started, but it could not be broadcast. This is because the name you are using to broadcast as is already being used. You will have to choose another name if you want to use broadcasting.