[malkia]

I had a wonderful app MS-DOS resident (TSR) on my PC that when pressing a key would do a snapshot of the whole memory (or specific area) to disk, to a file. So if you play a game, and lose a live, or HP points, you keep on pressing this, and then there were tools to do the diff.

There was one game that was storing the lifes as actual text - Ninja or something....

So last year my son was hacking some games, and nowadays there is a similar tool too - also based on diffs - though with me back then it was only 640KB, and nowadays we are looking towards 8-16GB if not more!

Somehow this technique still works for some games, but with way more gotchas...

[memesarecool]

CheatEngine (80mb) is very widely used nowadays and does memory dumps and comparisons. A very useful tool not only for game reverse engineering.

[maeil]

That's a broad use of "nowadays", haha. Following step-by-step Cheat Engine tutorials to use game hacks (MapleStory and Gunbound) was my first brush with coding/system internals when I was a child. This must have been around 2006 and it was already the most popular tool back then, though I remember there were loads of forks to bypass what must have been primitive anticheat systems that scanned for whether Cheat Engine was running.

[pajko]

Used to do this in my childhood with save files. Save the game in Alone in the Dark, shoot the shotgun, save, shoot again, save, then proceed to look for the differences.

[samwhiteUK]

I remember using CWCheat on PSP in the WWE games to create my own custom modes, adding ladders to Royal Rumble etc. Great fun