Hacking VitaCheat/FinalCheat Database

[eighthdayregret]

Maybe we should start ID'ing some of these games based on what they're doing in their addresses for future research purposes seeing as multiple games seems to be using the same methods. Like if a game uses segs, memory swapping, etc. we mark or group them in a list or something on the github or gives some notes. It'll give someone else a heads up on what to expect when trying to make codes for the game but I guess it would be the same as the wiki then when I think about it. Also I'm not that good either, I have zero programing experience and the most I know is just hex, mostly playing around with the hex section in the windows calculator lol. I think I'm just more active when it comes to code finding.


Yeah I'm using the same save slot. I don't know why I haven't thought of doing this, I've never actually looked at a Vita's game save file though. So do I just use Save Manager to look at it unencrypted?

If the save doesn't have additional encryption, you can just go to ux0:user/00/savedata (or whatever the folder is), highlight the game's save folder, press triangle and choose "Open Decrypted."
This doesn't always work, though. A lot of the games Ratalaika and Kemco release have a second level of encryption (you can usually tell because the save will be fucking gibberish, and at the top, you might see SVGM in the header. Those kinds of saves might require Save Manager, but I've never used it, so your mileage may vary.

Also, yes. Marking games as seg1/pointers/etc might not be a bad idea. And the wiki is always editable. I'm still working on setting up the forum, so we can have focused discussions and use that to update the GitHub and wiki.

Also, some games use multiple irritating things. Criminal Girls uses static, pointer, and seg1 addresses.
So there's that.
Speaking of Criminal Girls, when you do something wrong with a code on 3.68 h-encore2 and z06, the game crashes hard. Like, I hafta hard shutdown my Vita. That game gets angry at you for making mistakes.

 

[monodevil]

Ok I just tried it with Save Manager(I hate how this app has no kind of information on how to use it) and I believe it does decrypt saves very easily. I can see my current currency in HxD. To back up a bit, when doing a search for currency in Exist Archive, I would always get 2 addresses:
8280E4D4
85710288
The 85 ones seems to be my working address while the 82 ones, I have no clue what that one is for but I still write it down just in case. When looking into my save file in a hex editor, I can see both currency addresses just fine.

What you see highlighted is my working current currency, the multiple BF's let me know that that's my working currency address as I have another dump that shows the same thing. So......what do I do lol? I don't know where to start with all this.

 

[eighthdayregret]

Ok I just tried it with Save Manager(I hate how this app has no kind of information on how to use it) and I believe it does decrypt saves very easily. I can see my current currency in HxD. To back up a bit, when doing a search for currency in Exist Archive, I would always get 2 addresses:
8280E4D4
85710288
The 85 ones seems to be my working address while the 82 ones, I have no clue what that one is for but I still write it down just in case. When looking into my save file in a hex editor, I can see both currency addresses just fine.

What you see highlighted is my working current currency, the multiple BF's let me know that that's my working currency address as I have another dump that shows the same thing. So......what do I do lol? I don't know where to start with all this.

So the other stuff you're working, the stuff with the items, see if there's something structurally similar , and you might be able to discern the pattern for item slots in game. You should see something somewhat close you what you're looking at In Vitacheat. From there, you can perhaps compare addresses before and after to see if you can get the size of your item data. What I would suggest is maybe making a save with only one item, that way it might be easier to recognize the end of the data.

 

[monodevil]

So the other stuff you're working, the stuff with the items, see if there's something structurally similar , and you might be able to discern the pattern for item slots in game. You should see something somewhat close you what you're looking at In Vitacheat. From there, you can perhaps compare addresses before and after to see if you can get the size of your item data. What I would suggest is maybe making a save with only one item, that way it might be easier to recognize the end of the data.

Ok, didn't think finding items would be this easy but I think I found my items or the values at least, completely different than what I saw in my dumps.

From the looks of it, items are 10 bytes from each other and I'm currently holding 32 items so it all added up. I think the other digits inside the 10 bytes are the item's ID. I also found the pattern that they're sorted in, they sort in Items Newly obtained ascending(up arrow) option.

Now I'm wondering how I missed this, this game doesn't even save your sort order when you restart the game, it defaults to Items Newly obtained descending(down arrow) option. So yeah

 

[Yohoki]

lol. It's the simple things we forget to check. I'm well aware of the struggles of climbing Mount Stupid. XD

 

[monodevil]

lol. It's the simple things we forget to check. I'm well aware of the struggles of climbing Mount Stupid. XD

Yeah I'm starting to see the bigger picture now. Taking a look in my dumps now, items are a whopping 412 bytes from each other its no wonder I couldn't see anything. This is almost as big as the Disgaea games.

Now I know where the starting addresses to items are but still wonder what all that space is for. So now I need to look for why I can't seem to find a pointer for this. Maybe I need to dig deeper in tempAR?

 

[eighthdayregret]

Yeah I'm starting to see the bigger picture now. Taking a look in my dumps now, items are a whopping 412 bytes from each other its no wonder I couldn't see anything. This is almost as big as the Disgaea games.

Now I know where the starting addresses to items are but still wonder what all that space is for. So now I need to look for why I can't seem to find a pointer for this. Maybe I need to dig deeper in tempAR?

How are you doing your dumps? In-game when the values change, or on restarts? Might try a combination of both, if you haven't already.

 

[mkhn71]

pls put mgs hd collection PCSB00118 cheats.
thank u

 

[Yohoki]

One of y'all mentioned the LowMemMode plugin a while back not working with VitaShell..... Did you try it with this? https://www.psx-place.com/threads/b...rver-for-transfering-file-to-your-vita.28303/

This sounds like a pretty good way to get our dumps mid-game before the pointers and things reset.

Update:
It sure does work.
Some games, like Ys XIII, need to be opened before BGFTP, but afterwards, you can FTP with Filezilla over WiFi. BGFTP will give a notification saying the IP address and Port to use in Filezilla and it just works(tm)

I think that's as close to a live RAM view on PC as we're going to get, guys.

Thanks @dbzgts for letting me know about that.

 

[monodevil]

One of y'all mentioned the LowMemMode plugin a while back not working with VitaShell..... Did you try it with this? https://www.psx-place.com/threads/b...rver-for-transfering-file-to-your-vita.28303/

This sounds like a pretty good way to get our dumps mid-game before the pointers and things reset.

Update:
It sure does work.
Some games, like Ys XIII, need to be opened before BGFTP, but afterwards, you can FTP with Filezilla over WiFi. BGFTP will give a notification saying the IP address and Port to use in Filezilla and it just works(tm)

I think that's as close to a live RAM view on PC as we're going to get, guys.

Thanks @dbzgts for letting me know about that.

That was me and holy shit this is amazing, trying it now. You obviously can't take a peek are running games and save files though but everything else runs smoothly. Trying to do a few dump comparison however, I don't see my new dumps. Does vitacheat save dumps in like a temp folder or something?

Edit-
Yeah it seems like newly created dumps only show up until after you close out of the game. Oh well, at least now we can see what shows up when you start a game.

 

[eighthdayregret]

Yeah I'm starting to see the bigger picture now. Taking a look in my dumps now, items are a whopping 412 bytes from each other its no wonder I couldn't see anything. This is almost as big as the Disgaea games.

Now I know where the starting addresses to items are but still wonder what all that space is for. So now I need to look for why I can't seem to find a pointer for this. Maybe I need to dig deeper in tempAR?

I actually took the time to download the game and try to do... anything with it an failed. That game and One More Dungeon are officially my "fuck you and anyone who looks like you" games. Can't find a damn thing in either game.

The FTP thing... Can you copy your men searches to PC or something before they disappear?

 

[monodevil]

I actually took the time to download the game and try to do... anything with it an failed. That game and One More Dungeon are officially my "fuck you and anyone who looks like you" games. Can't find a damn thing in either game.

The FTP thing... Can you copy your men searches to PC or something before they disappear?

If you're talking about dumps, new dumps just don't show up until you close out of the game, it sounds like a vitacheat thing. Maybe it stores your dumps in a temp folder somewhere before existing a game and there's a lot of little folders that are made when running a game. Right now I'm letting my FTP client(WinSCP) run a search for a certain dump name and hope maybe I find it. Old dumps you'll already have before starting the game still show up, the same as if you were still using vitashell basically

 

[Yohoki]

If you're talking about dumps, new dumps just don't show up until you close out of the game, it sounds like a vitacheat thing. Maybe it stores your dumps in a temp folder somewhere before existing a game and there's a lot of little folders that are made when running a game. Right now I'm letting my FTP client(WinSCP) run a search for a certain dump name and hope maybe I find it. Old dumps you'll already have before starting the game still show up, the same as if you were still using vitashell basically

No. I just got a dump of the game while running. If you're using FileZilla, you need to hit the 'Refresh file and folder lists' button in the menu bar. Whatever client you're using isn't refreshing the file list and is just remembering what was in the folder at the time you opened it. It needs to poll the vita again for a fresh file list.

Here, it shows one of the dumps is 0bytes because it's currently dumping and the actual data is in a temp file somewhere else.

 

[Purple_Heart]

can someone tell me where can i get latest cheats for VitaCheat? best would be a database/collection

 

[Yohoki]

can someone tell me where can i get latest cheats for VitaCheat? best would be a database/collection

First post, dude. r0ah's github has them

VitaCheat is a plugin like GohanMem and rinCheat.

But works on NoNpDRM dump and also maidump.


Download link to the plugin: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2W8mjrCrdk3bDdEV1FJR1pIbmc/view?usp=sharing

Users manual: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2W8mjrCrdk3TW9hSUdZZm0tVzQ/view?usp=sharing

PSV file manual: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2W8mjrCrdk3OWZlTHh4dzlTN0E

PDF password: psvitacheat



Some cheats are here: https://github.com/r0ah/vitacheat

 

[Yohoki]

So, with this BGFTP, we can do a couple of new things....

1. It's much fuckin easier...
We don't have to dump, then close the game to copy the dump every single time and lose any progress we might have been making. And, we can easily put new codes in the .PSV file.... I dunno how often it updates this list, though. Needs testing. I think it actually puts the PSV in RAM on game load, so it may not be very useful.

2. We now have a pseudo-live view of RAM.
The RAM for the game stays pretty static when Vitacheat is up, and I assume the important parts of RAM are definitely frozen when we are on the live screen area and when in standby. So, we could work with the dump on PC while sitting on the live area or just pressing the power button once. That dump should be pretty close to accurate when we start back up and are ready to work with things again. I imagine this would be EXTRA helpful for those of us hacking games like Disgaea, where Items have TONS of information... We could now look at the Item list in CheatEngine's 'Dissect Data/Structures' mode and have a really great tool to help keep track of what all the values mean. *cough* @monodevil *cough*

These psuedo-live RAM snapshots 'should' stay pretty accurate, so long as we don't have the game running (so either Live area or standby) and won't go stale or reset pointers while we're working with them. We can immediately apply any new ideas we get from CheatEngine/HxD.

3. We can now use some more powerful tools.
CheatEngine is REALLY great... but loading a single dump and only working with that isn't useful..... But....... We could load a second dump after the first... so Imagine this scenario....

We have an HP bar, but don't know if it's decimal, floating point of hex..... So, we can take a dump of a large area (81... to 91...) and load it in CheatEngine. On CheatEngine, we can search for MULTIPLE code types at once, or use multiple tabs to search for HP, MP and EXP at once. Then, we can go into the game and take some damage and make a new dump. Back in CheatEngine, we can now load the new dump but KEEP the old results and code list. The new dump can now be searched for changes to the values we had searched for before... Effectively, we can now bypass vitacheat's (....limited...) search function altogether for a much more robust one.

4. We can now search for 64-bit values.
Same as above. VitaCheat's search engine only supports 8/16/32-bit searches, but CheatEngine can do binary, 8/16/32/64-bit, Array of Byte and String searches. Games like Don't Starve that use almost entirely 64-bit addresses can be easily searched and edited now.

5. We can make use of the 'Import Memory (Unsafe)' mode.
If we want to make a change to a large area on a game, we can use the 'Export Memory (Unsafe Mode)' to export just enough of the RAM for us to use. Edit it, then upload it back and Import it. We could immediately apply a large edit that we carefully made on PC with our other powerful tools and apply it to the already running game... I dunno how useful this would be to newbies, but to experienced users, this sounds pretty useful for a kind of 'quick patch' if we want to quickly set somethings up that we do often. Could even be used to make some really awesome custom codes, I bet..... I mean, I DO use vitacheat to hack vitacheat, so I'm prob gonna do something crazy with this as well. XD

I'm sure there's other really useful things for this.... I think @Smoker1 was having issues with a slot car racing game a while back... this may be the kick we needed to finally get that fucker cracked.

Edit: Wall of text alert... My bad guys, but this a pretty awesome change. At least, I think it is.

 

[eighthdayregret]

That was me and holy shit this is amazing, trying it now. You obviously can't take a peek are running games and save files though but everything else runs smoothly. Trying to do a few dump comparison however, I don't see my new dumps. Does vitacheat save dumps in like a temp folder or something?

Edit-
Yeah it seems like newly created dumps only show up until after you close out of the game. Oh well, at least now we can see what shows up when you start a game.

So, with this BGFTP, we can do a couple of new things....

1. It's much fuckin easier...
We don't have to dump, then close the game to copy the dump every single time and lose any progress we might have been making. And, we can easily put new codes in the .PSV file.... I dunno how often it updates this list, though. Needs testing. I think it actually puts the PSV in RAM on game load, so it may not be very useful.

2. We now have a pseudo-live view of RAM.
The RAM for the game stays pretty static when Vitacheat is up, and I assume the important parts of RAM are definitely frozen when we are on the live screen area and when in standby. So, we could work with the dump on PC while sitting on the live area or just pressing the power button once. That dump should be pretty close to accurate when we start back up and are ready to work with things again. I imagine this would be EXTRA helpful for those of us hacking games like Disgaea, where Items have TONS of information... We could now look at the Item list in CheatEngine's 'Dissect Data/Structures' mode and have a really great tool to help keep track of what all the values mean. *cough* @monodevil *cough*

These psuedo-live RAM snapshots 'should' stay pretty accurate, so long as we don't have the game running (so either Live area or standby) and won't go stale or reset pointers while we're working with them. We can immediately apply any new ideas we get from CheatEngine/HxD.

3. We can now use some more powerful tools.
CheatEngine is REALLY great... but loading a single dump and only working with that isn't useful..... But....... We could load a second dump after the first... so Imagine this scenario....

We have an HP bar, but don't know if it's decimal, floating point of hex..... So, we can take a dump of a large area (81... to 91...) and load it in CheatEngine. On CheatEngine, we can search for MULTIPLE code types at once, or use multiple tabs to search for HP, MP and EXP at once. Then, we can go into the game and take some damage and make a new dump. Back in CheatEngine, we can now load the new dump but KEEP the old results and code list. The new dump can now be searched for changes to the values we had searched for before... Effectively, we can now bypass vitacheat's (....limited...) search function altogether for a much more robust one.

4. We can now search for 64-bit values.
Same as above. VitaCheat's search engine only supports 8/16/32-bit searches, but CheatEngine can do binary, 8/16/32/64-bit, Array of Byte and String searches. Games like Don't Starve that use almost entirely 64-bit addresses can be easily searched and edited now.

5. We can make use of the 'Import Memory (Unsafe)' mode.
If we want to make a change to a large area on a game, we can use the 'Export Memory (Unsafe Mode)' to export just enough of the RAM for us to use. Edit it, then upload it back and Import it. We could immediately apply a large edit that we carefully made on PC with our other powerful tools and apply it to the already running game... I dunno how useful this would be to newbies, but to experienced users, this sounds pretty useful for a kind of 'quick patch' if we want to quickly set somethings up that we do often. Could even be used to make some really awesome custom codes, I bet..... I mean, I DO use vitacheat to hack vitacheat, so I'm prob gonna do something crazy with this as well. XD

I'm sure there's other really useful things for this.... I think @Smoker1 was having issues with a slot car racing game a while back... this may be the kick we needed to finally get that fucker cracked.

Edit: Wall of text alert... My bad guys, but this a pretty awesome change. At least, I think it is.

Dude.

 

[Yohoki]

Dude.

bro.

 

[monodevil]

No. I just got a dump of the game while running. If you're using FileZilla, you need to hit the 'Refresh file and folder lists' button in the menu bar. Whatever client you're using isn't refreshing the file list and is just remembering what was in the folder at the time you opened it. It needs to poll the vita again for a fresh file list.
View attachment 211639
Here, it shows one of the dumps is 0bytes because it's currently dumping and the actual data is in a temp file somewhere else.

I see the refresh option in WinSCP, probably should have been the first thing I checked lol. It also has an option to set it to refresh every something odd seconds. As for everything else, just damn. I gotta start using CheatEngine, I see it brought up a lot everywhere but never really used it myself. Crap, now I want to go back and look at past games I've worked on.

 

[dbzgts]

Update:
It sure does work.
Some games, like Ys XIII, need to be opened before BGFTP, but afterwards, you can FTP with Filezilla over WiFi. BGFTP will give a notification saying the IP address and Port to use in Filezilla and it just works(tm)

I think that's as close to a live RAM view on PC as we're going to get, guys. I like your explanation @Yohoki. Very simple, clear and understandable

Thanks @dbzgts for letting me know about that.

I'm glad can help you guys make everything more easier. Still can't participate making cheat code but hopefully still can provide some idea