The Cheat

The legendary universal game trainer for Mac OS X. This baby empowers you to search the memory footprints of other running processes and even do a little covert tweaking. The most apparent (and awesome) application for this gem is changing the values of interesting variables within games in real time. Yeah, that might be considered cheating, which is where this little program gets its name. Here is a rundown of the most notable features:

• Search for many types of variables, including strings, integers, and floating point numbers.
• Bonjour-aware networking allows you to cheat remotely from another computer.
• File saving and opening. Once you find a cheat, save it and maybe it will work next time.

While development on The Cheat has been dormant, another project named  iHaxGamez has taken up the banner and gathered itself a following. I don't know anything about it, but it might be more up-to-date and suit your needs better, so you should also check it out.

Download

 The Cheat 1.2.5 for Intel/PPC (22 Nov 2010) - This latest version is based on patches from Zhe Fang; thanks!

Size: 711K
 MD5: 429b54298b804bc5e9343ac179eba428

Please view the  ChangeLog to see what's new in this version. Also, the source code has now been pushed to a repository. To download snapshots, use  GitWeb. Or, if you have git installed, just clone it:

git clone git://git.brokenzipper.com/pub/thecheat
cd thecheat

Older binaries (which may be more compatible with older versions of Mac OS X) can still be downloaded from the archives:

•  FTP
•  HTTP

How To Use It

This software is not necessarily easy to use if you are new and inexperienced. The target audience for this software includes software developers and hardcore gamers. It will help if you know a few things about bits and bytes. Nevertheless, the documentation available is pretty good, so if you have the desire and a little bit of time to learn some new things, you won't have any problems. So, if you're ready, start here:

• FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
• Tutorial - Invincibility in Yoink
• Tutorial - Lots o' Fish in Tux Racer
• The Manual - Also available from The Cheat's Help menu.

If you are using an Intel Mac, reports suggest that you must set a certain kernel option in order for The Cheat to work. Open up Terminal.app and enter this, typing your password when prompted:

sudo sysctl -w kern.tfp.policy=1

You can set this option automatically when the machine starts by writing kern.tfp.policy=1 to /etc/sysctl.conf. You will need Administrator privileges to do so.

Getting Help

Hopefully the resources listed here will be enough to give you a good start. If you need additional help, you can contact me, but I probably won't be able to be as helpful as you would hope. I don't have a Mac anymore, and it's been a long time since I've played any significant role in the development of The Cheat. You may have better luck searching the internet for other people using The Cheat (they are out there) and asking them questions.

Are there any bugs in The Cheat? Maybe. You can submit a bug report if you think you've found one, and maybe it will even get fixed some day.

License

This software is licensed according to the terms and conditions of the 2-clause BSD License.

Brought To You By…

The Cheat is the project I cut my teeth on as I was learning Objective-C and good programming practice in general. I had been tinkering in software since I was a small child, but this peach of a project is my first one that actually did something useful. Yet, it wouldn't have been possible without the support of several other contributors, in no particular order:

•  Andrew Smith contributed icons and provided moral support and friendship. Thanks!
• Ed Palma provided the original vision, especially with regards to the network support and remote cheating.
• Adrien Pujol and Zhe Fang have done some work maintaining The Cheat since my Mac died.
• I know there were many others who should be in this list, but please forgive my poor memory.