Cheating at a game is bending the rules a little bit, to make it easier on yourself or to change the overall experience. Most of the time, cheats are implemented to give users the ability to tweak the gameplay in a way which they prefer.

Doing this is nothing to be ashamed of, at least if you’re playing it offline. Of course, opinions may vary widely on this subject.

Cheating can help you achieve something, which would otherwise be out of your reach. It also enables you to experience a game in the way you like it. I for one always use cheats while playing Grand Theft Auto, not because I think it’s too hard a game but just because I like it that way.

Another example. If you’ve ever played The Sims, it’s almost certain you’ve cheated.  Does “rosebud” ring any bells? I tried to play it once without using this money cheat, but I didn’t like it. The best thing in The Sims is building houses, so it bothered me having to go to work every day just so we could succeed in laying a carpet.

Most often, cheats are embedded by the game makers. We activate them by pressing a series of buttons, or by entering them in a specific menu. Sadly, not all games have cheats available.

For those games that don’t have any cheats, or to make the cheating easier, there’s Poke. This nifty application gives you the ability to cheat in nearly every game!

Poke

Several years ago, Márton Anka developed Poke for commercial purposes. However, it was never released as a product and was forgotten about. Now he has decided to give it away for free!

How does it work?

If you want to know how Poke works, you need to understand the basics of how games work, and how RAM works.

RAM is the temporary memory of your computer. In contrast to your hard drive, which is static memory and which will stay the same unless you or a program changes it, RAM memory is maintained for each computer session. As soon as you pull the plug, everything will disappear. This memory is, among other things, used by applications to store temporary data, like the contents of that Word document you haven’t saved.

Also in this memory is game data, like the amount of experience points you’ve obtained, or the number of bullets you’ve got left.

Poke searches through this memory to find out where those numbers are stored, after which you can change it to any value you like. If we go back to our Sims example for instance, Poke can find the amount of money you have, and change it to any given number.

How to use Poke

Upon opening Poke, you’ll be asked to choose a process. Select the game in which you want to cheat.

I’ll be using Far Cry 2 to illustrate the process.

As you can see below, I’ve got very few bullets left. We’ll be using Poke to find the memory location of the amount of bullets, and change it.

To do this, press the ‘Add’ button in Poke. In the window that opens, you’ll be able to set your search parameters. In the case of Far Cry 2, ’18′.

If you’re using a 32 or 64 bit application, you’ll have to search for a DWORD value type.

Enter the value and press Next.

Poke will now look through the RAM and take all locations which contains the value 18. It’s normal that there are a number of locations where this value is represented, therefore we’ll narrow down the possibilities by performing another search.

Shoot a few bullets and search again with the new value. You can repeat this process until you’ve got only one location left. You’ll be prompted to name the value and it will be added to the main screen.

You can change this number by pressing ‘Current Value’, and also set it by checking the box. This is something you should do in this case, as it will give you infinite ammunition, likewise with financial data.

That’s all there is to it!

What do you think of Poke? Easy to use?