Windows 95/98

In-Game Trainers

This was an enjoyable time for me. The games were aplenty and there were tools out there (esp. the Trainer Maker Kit) that took a lot of the hard work away from finding out where a lives/ammo/health counter was stored in memory.

The only downside was that if a patch to a game was released, you had to redo the trainer from scratch as there was a high probability that the memory location(s) you had found for the first version of the trainer, had now moved.

However, due to hard-drive crashes and incorrect backups of old websites, most of my trainers haven’t survived. They used to be sent to various websites for distribution, although sometimes certain trainers were done as ‘exclusives’ for a bit of back-scratching credits for other stuff. I was especially proud of my Delta Force 2 trainer but can’t find a copy of it anywhere.

I’ve even tried using Way Back Machine to look at an older copy of my website – but none of the downloads have been kept for posterity 🙁

However, as and when I find the trainers, I will upload them onto this site. So far, I’ve only found this one from 17 years ago!

NFS Porsche (Need for Speed: Porsche Challenge +1 – done 1st May 2000)

January 2019 Update!

I found, buried on an old hard-drive, an almost complete collection of all of my old PC trainers for Windows 95/98.

There’s quite a few in this .ZIP file and, hopefully, you can still find some of the games on the various Abandonware websites out there.

Install the game(s) and copy the trainer(s) into a VirtualBox / Virtual PC image running Windows 95/98 and away you go!

Click here to grab them all (5.5Mb file).

Some of them weren’t done using Trainer Maker Kit either. The really small .ZIP files used various Process Patching engines at the time, which didn’t give you hotkeys as such, but just loaded in the game and switched on the cheats automatically.

Until I refreshed my memory and looked at some of these trainers, I had totally forgotten that I had experimented with these types of patch tools back in the day.

There was a website (back in the day) which was full of these kinds of tools, along with various code regenerators, x86 disassemblers and unpackers. I can’t remember its name though, and, the site has probably disappeared.

Cheats Always Prosper

Back in the above days, I wrote a step-by-step guide explaining how to create your own trainers using the Trainer Maker Kit. It can be found on this page.

Saved Game Editors

I didn’t do a great many of these back in the day, but here are two that survived the afore-mentioned hard-drive crashes from 2002. Both saved game editors were written for games from a company calling themselves N@RCOT!X (www.narcotix.co.uk). Their site has been dead since 2007 (according to Way Back Machine), but the games might still be available elsewhere.

Judging by the coding, it looks like I worked out the code for one game and then adapted the same VB Script code to hack the other game’s saved data. The game’s data was saved in the Windows registry and it was easy enough to hunt down and ‘adapt’ 🙂

The VB Script code is just a registry patch with a simple front-end. It should be easily adaptable but, from memory, VB Script was being used more and more around this time to deliver virus payloads, so a lot of websites wouldn’t host the above two editors, for obvious reasons!