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
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...
6. Find Config and Target, and change it to Release 64-Bit. Click "OK"
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

8. Done!

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   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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