VM Cheats
December 29, 2008
What are VM Cheats? VM cheat tables contain a game's state variables and their position in memory (and potentially savegame files, if I could find out), and with the use of a debugger or hypervisor, these variables can be externally influenced to cause the cheating.
VM Cheats work because the regular cheat code logic, usually invoked via keyboard, mouse or joystick, and which causes secondary logic, such as not awarding points, is not triggered at all. Most, if not all games, do not even have logic to detect this sort of hardware-assisted cheating (value changed without cheat code handler being invoked), but for games that have distributed state (e.g. network games), such sudden changes in the game state may cause disconnects, aborts, or generally undefined behavior.
List of VM cheats for games:
Notes
The description pages will use stdint types to denote the
format, e.g. int16_t, uint16_t for a signed or
unsigned 16-bit integer, respectively. Just be aware that writing 0xFFFF is
not always the right thing to do :-).
