Nearly everybody likes to have a little game every now and then, whether it’s a round of Windows Solitaire or the latest Call of Duty or Age of Empires. Another very popular area of gaming is the world of Flash based games which use the Adobe Flash Player from within your web browser to run. It’s especially popular among children because the games are often simple and quite easy to understand with about as much experience and knowledge needed as playing a game of Angry Birds.
If you get stuck in a normal PC game that you install on your computer, there’s usually walkthroughs, cheat codes, help guides and trainers available from a host of sources to help you out with unlimited money, health and so on. But Flash games seldom have built-in cheats and they’re a lot harder to find. Although most Flash games are easy to play, some of them are fiendishly difficult to complete which leads to frustration because there is so little help on the internet available.
One of the only ways to cheat in Flash based games is to hack the memory of the game much like an ordinary game trainer does. Here’s the simple explanation of how you can hack flash games with a program called Cheat Engine. You use Cheat Engine to load the browser process that is running the Flash game, search for the cheat value in memory, then modify or freeze the value. If you change the value to a higher number, you’ll get a higher value such as more money. If you freeze it, that means you won’t run out of that value. Here’s how to do it.
Setting up Cheat Engine
1. Download and install the Cheat Engine program. Alternatively you can download the adware free portable version from the same page and extract the Rar file with your favorite archiver. Then launch Cheat Engine.
2. Open the Flash game in your web browser.
3. Click on the flashing Open Process button in Cheat Engine.
4. Click on the necessary process in the list and click Open. Depending on which browser you’re using, the process that Cheat Engine needs to monitor will differ.
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer will usually create 2 processes for itself and sometimes 3, select the lowest process in the list. If you have 3 iexplore.exe processes, try the second one if the bottom one doesn’t work.
Mozilla Firefox
Firefox loads the Flash player into an external plugin container process and more recent versions of Flash also spawn two FlashPlayerPlugin_{version}.exe processes. Open the lowest FlashPlayerPlugin.exe process.
Google Chrome
Because Chrome opens so many processes for tabs and extensions it’s more tricky to identify which one to open in Cheat Engine. To find out:
1. Press Shift+Escape in Chrome to open its task manager, find the task for the Shockwave Flash plugin and note down its Process ID.
2. The ID needs to be converted into Hex so you can identify it in Cheat Engine. Either go to an online Decimal to Hex converter, type the ID and press the button to get a Hex value, or open the Windows Calculator from the Accessories menu in Start and convert to Hex from there.
3. Go back to Cheat Engine and find the Chrome process that matches the Hex value. In the example above “3852” converted to “F0C” so that process is selected.
Finding A Simple Money Cheat
As a demonstration, we’re going to hack a couple of Flash games to show how easy it can be once you know what to look for. Do note that not every game will work and not all are easy, but when you know how to search it will make things easier. The first game is calledSteamPunk Tower Defense and is one of the classic tower defense type games.
1. When you start the game some defenses have to be purchased to go into the tower, and you have 11000 credits to start with and the ability to buy 4 different guns. Click the blue button to buy something.
2. Now go into Cheat Engine and enter 11000 into the Value box, then press enter. Almost immediately you will see some address values popup on the left which is all the 11000 values in the game’s memory.
3. Go back to the Steampunk game and buy a gun such as the machine gun, notice the credits are now at 4000. If you look in the Cheat Engine window, you’ll also notice one of the values has changed to 4000. As it’s the only value to do this we can assume that is the value that holds the credit amount.
4. To quickly edit the value, right click on the 4000 and select “Change value of selected addresses”. In the popup box enter a higher number such as 400000 and press enter. Look in the game now and your credits will be at 400000!For several Flash based games it really is that easy to cheat and give yourself more money or points etc. Some games will require you to spend some more money to trigger the value change and others will also change the address for the value on new levels, in which case you will need to perform a new search.
Filtering Out Multiple Values
It obviously gets a bit more tricky if your game starts with a small amount of money or you’re trying to cheat with lives or bullets. There will be thousands of values of something like 5 lives, 20 bullets or 50 credits, and they have to be filtered out as best as possible. For this next example, we’re going to increase the bullet count in a game called Bounzy 2. As you can see, you start with 9 bullets.
1. In Cheat Engine click the New Scan button, enter a value of 9 into the box and press enter. Look above the address box on the left and there will be thousands of found values for 9, this obviously has to be reduced.
2. Go back to the game and fire a shot which reduces the bullets to 8. In Cheat Engine, change the value in the box to 8 and press the Next Scan button. You should be down to no more than a few addresses in the box. Fire another shot and do a Next Scan search again for 7, now the found addresses should be down to 1. For this or any other game, you simply need to keep narrowing the found values down by going to the game and changing the value, then searching again in Cheat Engine. Eventually you’ll end up with no more than a few entries.
3. Right click on the addresses value in Cheat Engine, select “Change value of selected addresses” and change it to 50. Now fire a shot in the game and the bullets will jump to 50. When rockets and grenades are available you can do the same thing.
There’s a useful option in Cheat Engine to freeze the value, so if you want to keep the bullets at 50 all the time, they can be locked there to create infinite ammo. To do it, double click the address value on the left which will enter it into the list at the bottom. Then place an X in the Active column for each value to you want to freeze.
If You Can’t Find the Correct Values
If you’re having trouble finding a number such as a monetary value etc, some Flash games require a slight modification to the values you enter. Whatever you look for needs to be multiplied by a factor of 8, so if looking for an amount of money such as 10 doesn’t work, look for 80 instead and filter accordingly.
As a simple example, the game Swords and Sandals 3 does this when you’re searching for money or skill points. If you look at the image below, the game actually starts off with 5 skill points, but the value held at the address for those points is multiplied by 8, entering a value of 320 in Cheat Engine will increase this to 40 points.
f you come across the multiply by 8 in your searches, make sure to keep all values you enter into Cheat Engine to multiples of 8 or the cheat won’t work and you could even crash the game. We have also heard of a few games needing a slightly different multiplier of 8 and then adding 6 to the result, so the above would be 326, although we never came across any games needing this extra step during testing.
In addition to searching for exact values, Cheat Engine is able to perform conditional searches by clicking on the Scan Type drop down. You can search for values greater or smaller than a specified number, between 2 values, and also values that increase/decrease or change/remain unchanged. With those combinations more advanced filtering can be applied which should narrow down the results and get the correct addresses and values.
Sincerely,
TheAverageModder