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Using Cheat Engine with Dimensions Recomp

Cheat Engine attaches to the game fine, and writing works. Two things make a plain scan come up empty, and both are settings on the Cheat Engine side.

1. Turn on scanning of mapped memory

Guest memory is not an ordinary allocation: it is a file mapping, aliased into several windows so the guest's 0xA0000000/0xC0000000 views point at the same bytes. Windows reports those pages as MEM_MAPPED, and Cheat Engine skips MEM_MAPPED by default, so the entire game state is invisible to a scan.

Cheat Engine -> Edit -> Settings -> Scan Settings, and tick MEM_MAPPED (leave MEM_PRIVATE and MEM_IMAGE as they are). Without this, nothing else here matters.

2. Scan as big-endian

The game is Xbox 360 code, so every value in guest memory is stored big-endian. 100 studs is 00 00 00 64, which Cheat Engine's normal 4-byte scan reads as 1677721600.

Value type dropdown -> Define new custom type (Lua) -> paste one of the scripts from tools/cheatengine/:

File Type it defines
BigEndian4Bytes.lua Big Endian 4 Bytes — counters, IDs, flags
BigEndian2Bytes.lua Big Endian 2 Bytes
BigEndianFloat.lua Big Endian Float — health, timers, positions

They stay in Cheat Engine's settings after that; you only add them once. Byte-array and string scans need no custom type — but text in the title is Latin-1, not UTF-16.

3. Guest addresses vs. what Cheat Engine shows

Cheat Engine shows host addresses. The guest arena is placed wherever the 64-bit address space had room (usually 0x0000000100000000, but not guaranteed), so:

host address = guest membase + guest address

Open the in-game console (F4) and run membase to print the base for the current run. membase 82395D14 converts a guest address to a host one, and membase 1_8239_5D14 — any host address — converts back. The same line is written to game.log at startup as "Guest memory arena mapped".

So a guest pointer you found in a disassembly, say 0x82395D14, is at membase + 0x82395D14 in Cheat Engine, and a Cheat Engine hit at 0x182395D14 is guest 0x82395D14.

Guest pointers stored in memory are 32-bit and big-endian, so Cheat Engine's pointer scanner cannot follow them. Chase them by hand with membase, or use the console's peek/poke/findword, which already work in guest addresses.

Caveats

  • The arena base changes every run. Table entries are best saved as "membase + guest offset" notes rather than absolute addresses.
  • Addresses in the 0xA0000000–0xE0000000 range are GPU-visible physical memory. The runtime tracks writes to those pages itself; editing them from outside can be missed or overwritten, and is not a good place to cheat.
  • Freezing a value the game writes every frame costs performance under a debugger attach — expect some stutter while Cheat Engine is active.