Here’s a really neat tool that was released over 10 years ago: Cheat ‘O Matic. It was created by Nick Shaffner (who worked in 3DRealms). It’s useful for gamers who want to modify any numerical value in their games (e.g., amount of gold or health) and it’s extremely easy to use. Just select the game and search for the value you want to modify. Next, you have to modify the value within  game (by spending your gold or some similar action), enter the new value in Cheat ‘O Matic and click on search again. After a few such searches, Cheat ‘O Matic would have figured out which value you’re interested in. Now just set it to whatever you want and enjoy the game. Here’s a post from 1998 about it.

I’ve used it a couple of times to escape the drudgery in some games that were otherwise fun. For example, Freelancer was an especially good game; the controls were good, the action was fast paced, and I remember the story being particularly interesting (although I don’t actually remember what the story was). My only issue was that between bouts of sequences where I was engaged in unfolding the story, the game went into free-roam mode where I can explore any place I want and earn some goal by taking on bounty hunting missions. The gold was required so that I could upgrade my ship  and continue the story.

Essentially, in an effort to make the game longer, players were required to upgrade their ships to advance the story line and to upgrade their ships, they were required to grind by doing boring stuff. I just used Cheat-O-Matic, got the grinding out of the way and enjoyed the game.

The best part of Cheat ‘O Matic is that it still works  on Windows 7 and on the latest games. At least, that has been the experience in my case. I think it speaks volumes about the team in Microsoft that pays attention to backward compatibility (See Raymond Chen’s post). I’ve archived Cheat O’ Matic so you can download it by clicking here. Note that this program works great only on single-player games. Don’t expect it to work just as well on multiplayer-games.

I have lots of ammo now. Notice the counter on the top-left.

(For the game developers amongst you, tools like these should demonstrate why you never trust values from the client in a multiplayer game. They can and will modify the memory to cheat!)

Download Cheat ‘O Matic : Link