[j_z_reeves]

I never heard about cheat engine before. Are there similar tools for other platforms? I know you can hook GDB to any running process, but once you're in the process, discovering what is occurring is often pretty difficult.

I'm guessing this is how a lot of the game shark cheats were discovered back in the day.

[hexmiles]

for linux there is scanmem and it's gui gameconqueror, which offer the same core functionality of memory scanning

https://github.com/scanmem/scanmem