How To Cheat Tux Racer

This tutorial was created to demonstrate an early version of The Cheat. The graphical user interface of the program was updated since then, so the screenshots are not completely accurate. This tutorial is licensed under the terms and conditions of the  Creative Commons - Attribution / Share Alike license.

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If you're struggling with The Cheat, it may help you to run through this quick tutorial. I'll show you how to use The Cheat by actually using it on a simple game called Tux Racer. We're going to cheat Tux Racer into giving us a higher score. Now, normally I couldn't care less what score I got on Tux Racer, but for the sake of this tutorial, let's say that getting a high score is the most important thing in the world to me. Please keep in mind that The Cheat has the potential to do much more interesting things. If you want to follow along with the tutorial, you'll need to download  Tux Racer. Unfortunately, it may not run on modern versions of Mac OS X, but you may still find some value just reading along.

Now let's begin. First, launch The Cheat and the game you want to cheat. Then select the game you want to cheat from the list of programs on the cheat window, if it's not already selected. We're going to try to change the number of herring, because that will raise the score. The number of herring is a number value, and it's always a whole number. Because of this, it's most likely an integer. I don't know of any Tux Racer levels which let you get over 255 herring, so it very well could be a char integer, but most game developers still use long integers even though the value of that variable should never get to hold very big numbers. When in doubt, try long first. So, We're going to do a long integer search. This is the default search, but if it wasn't we would need to make the necessary adjustments to the popup menus on the cheat window. Then switch to your game and play it until you get to the part where you need to cheat.

Notice I raced until I got at least one herring. I could have paused the game right as it started, but then I would have zero herring. Searching for zero is always slower because much of an application's memory is set to zero when not used. It's always best to avoid searching for zero if you can. Tux Racer is now paused in the background. Pausing is not necessary for some games, but I don't want Tux to keep going down the hill while I'm cheating. Now enter the number 1 into the search field and press the search button.

Wow, there are a lot of results! If we chose the correct type of search and size of search value, the address of the number of herring should be in this list. We could change each one individually until we finally got the right one, but this is time consuming and dangerous because we would be changing memory without knowing what it is used for. This could result in the game crashing. The other alternative is to search again. Go to Tux Racer and race until you get another herring. You should now have two herring. Go back to The Cheat and enter the number 2 into the search field and press the search button.

Hopefully the results are fewer now. They should be much fewer. If there is only one result, it's likely that you've found the variable, in which case you can skip a few steps. But if there are still a few more results, you may want to do another search just to make sure. Go to Tux Racer and race until you get another herring. You should now have three herring. Go back to The Cheat and enter the number 4 into the search field. Note that this is not the correct value, but do it anyway. Press the search button.

Uh oh! We've made a mistake! We accidentally entered a 4 into the search field and now we don't have any results! (Thanks for playing along.) What on earth do we do? Not to fear, The Cheat supports undoing searches! Simply select "Undo" from the "Edit" menu and all will be corrected. Now enter the number 3 into the search field and press the search button.

Yay, we've found the variable! Actually, it is possible that this is not the correct variable, but I like our chances in this case. Searching is definitely the hard part; everything from here on out is cake. Now click on the change button and a sheet will appear.

Now enter a big number into the change field. It would do little good to have the change repeat at all, so we'll just leave the continuous change option off. Now click OK.

Voila! You've just successfully cheated your first game. For your information, Tux Racer is the first game I ever cheated with The Cheat, too. So, that's how it works. If there's anything you didn't understand about this tutorial or you want to contact me for any other reason, you can just email.