Project Artemis

[Lazy Bastard]

noobwithboobs: It was made specifically for one of the Socom games, I believe, and it's merely a proof-of-concept, and isn't ready to be used yet (it crashes instead of dumping, though I do believe it can be used a cheat system, assuming you have the exact version of whatever game it was made for, heh).

Oopo: In this case, we're willing to sacrifice speed for functionality, if it comes to that. There are many cases in which we'll need to search for things that haven't changed, and so forth. After the initial dump, we will be operating only on specific memory addresses, but there will still be a time in which we have to dump the entire memory.

[ooPo]

My lack of experience with code hunting shows.

How about a more generic approach, then? Make a very small layer that allows you to upload binary code pieces at runtime. You could minimize memory usage and defer development of the meatier parts until after the loader is finished.

[Lazy Bastard]

You mean an application that would allow us to launch an ELF, then stay resident, and merely allow us to upload and execute other pieces of code at will?

[misfire]

This can be seen as an extension of the planned upload feature. Might be a good idea (if it's feasible at all).

To get the project rolling, we'll need some working code to start with - a solid base for further development. Then we can continue our efforts and provide patches until we achieve our common purpose.

[misfire]

I hope that the participation will continue to increase when I've contributed some code. Many people seem to be interested in the project. Only time will show if the scene is really ready for such an open source project...

[Lazy Bastard]

Yeah; hopefully as many people as those that are interested will be interested in contributing

LMZ is working on setting up Mercurial, so we'll hopefully have a working version control system soon.

Feel free to prod Driver concerning his unreleased code, as well.

[LiquidManZero]

Mercurial is greatly confusing me trying to set it up. I suspect my lack of understanding how it works is the problem. The documentation hasn't helped much so far.

[misfire]

LMZ, if you get it working, please tell me how you did it. Is there any information on setting up an online Mercurial repository? I'm interested. Also, I recommend using hg.gshi.org or mercurial.gshi.org for repo access.

EDIT: Wikis are quite useful.

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wik.../ServerInstall
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wik...ngRepositories

[misfire]

Well, after a long time I finally had a look at my code again. Everything seems to build nicely on Ubuntu. Now I've got a rough idea of what I've done many moons ago...

What I can come up with is a working cheat system. I wrote most of the code back in 2005 as part of a program I called ps2cheat. For it I "borrowed" the cheat engine from CodeBreaker (and fixed some bugs in it). I added a boot loader with the ability to read cheats from a text file; another feature is video mode patching (incl. y-fix). I can say that it worked quite well and I never had to use another cheat program again.

I suggest using ps2cheat as Artemis' base for further development. For technical reasons, we gonna need a cheat engine anyway (we have to hook the game for both cheating and hacking). So I think this is a good first step.

Of course, there's lots of work to do. For example, there's no GUI yet and for obvious reasons, the cheat engine has to be rewritten.

Opinions?

[Lazy Bastard]

I suppose I should get a good set of fonts, and begin making a PS2-side GUI for Artemis. Shall we use .NET for the PC-side GUI, or should we aspire to a bit more portability? Obviously, we can save time and effort by using something like VB.NET, but users would be restricted to either running Windows, or trying to emulate it (Wine, etc).

[misfire]

Yes, somebody has to take care of the PS2-side GUI.

Although it's a bit early to talk about the client GUI, I think .NET is okay for Windows users (and maybe even for Linux with GTK#).

Anyway, the core parts should definitely be portable amongst various operating systems and independent from the GUI. Which means that we could create a DLL on Windows and a shared library on Linux (.so) based on one and the same source code (written in C/C++). You can then import the DLL's functions into your VB.NET application, for instance.

[Lazy Bastard]

Ah, good idea. I believe you mentioned the idea of writing a DLL in C, and using it in a .NET project.

Once I've thrown together some basic GUI prototypes, I'll take some screenshots and post them. Mind taking a shot or two of PS2Cheat?

[misfire]

ps2cheat has no GUI and is pretty ugly, but you can take some shots if you want.

I really think it's to early to talk about the client GUI as this is one of the last things we have to be concerned about.

[Lazy Bastard]

You, my friend, are a lazy bastard

Heh, I'll take some shots later. I figured I'd give you the chance to take them, since PS2Cheat was your creation. No matter.

Yes, but I do like to have an idea of what our general goals are. I'm not going to start writing the PC-side client app or anything (though, I could probably build most of it out of what's already in my unreleased version of Majestic Porter), and I don't know enough C/C++ to go around writing GUI apps, nor DLLs. It might even be wise to enlist the help of one of the other scene members that've written a few GUI apps in C (Viper187 comes to mind).

I'll try to start on the PS2-side GUI code tonight. We can always integrate it with PS2Cheat later (I'll be anxiously awaiting your cleaned-up version of PS2Cheat), and we can really begin doing some rapid revision once we have a version control system in place (LMZ is likely going to install SVN while we bandy Mercurial around, so we'll have a repository in the meantime, and can always import it into Mercurial later, if need be).

[misfire]

Hehe, actually I neither have a working PCSX2 installation nor a camera atm.

I'm gonna try to continue working on ps2cheat tomorrow and at the weekend...