Building Cheat Engine from source on Windows x64

Cheat Engine is a development environment focused on modding games and applications for personal use.

I'm using it for an AI Majesty project that's in the works.

Why build from source?

Cheat Engine is a pain to install. It has ads built into the installer, and Windows Defender will detect the application as malicious, which can cause installation to fail.

How

  1. Install Lazarus 2.0.101, both the main app and the cross-compilation addon.2 image.png
  2. Launch Lazarus 2.0.10 (optionally in admin mode)
  3. Clone the Cheat Engine repo to 38dce619dd9371819a1e8f649720e5a4350423273
  4. In Lazarus, go to Project > Open Project and select cheat-engine/Cheat Engine/cheatengine.lpi
  5. We want to compile the x64 version. Go to Project > Project options... image.png
  6. Find Config and Target, and change it to Release 64-Bit. Click "OK" image.png
  7. Running the application from Lazarus won't work unless you launched Lazarus in Admin mode. However, you can launch the application from Windows Explorer image.png
  8. Done! image.png


    1. Different versions of Cheat Engine require specific versions of Lazarus to compile correctly. See this issue. I have multiple versions of Lazarus installed side-by-side right now, since I'm trying to diagnose issues in different versions. At time of writing, only Lazarus 2.0.10 worked for me
    2. The cross-compilation part is only necessary to build x86. At time of writing, this doesn't work for me due to issue #2197
    3. At time of writing, master can't create pointer maps. This is caused by issue #2218. For me, the LKG commit was 38dce619dd9371819a1e8f649720e5a435042327

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