Some yeasr ago I played and deeply fell in love with a PS2 game called, "Dark Cloud," which I could play at my friend's house.
Then I bought a PS2 myself and could play the game at home.
Without using any cheats I managed to get all the way to the end where the 2nd evil genie was and then promptly got whooped every time.
I then bought an Action Replay Max for it so I could get past that one point, determined this would work.
Well, yes and no. It didn't show my hits go down but my player died all the same. Whoever wrote the cheat did not check to see if the value was going down even if it =APPEARED= that it wasn't.
Now, let's wind the clock forward a bit.
I recently got a very good powerful computer. While my old one would only let me play the PS2 emulator for Windows (PCSX2) at one frame every 2-seconds, my new computer said it runs full speed only taking 17% of my system resources !
YAY ! So then it should be an easy thing to get that one cheat to give my player infinite hits right ? Once again, yes and no.
I tried the Dark Cloud (USA) from Emuparadise (here) and found that to make cheats for it, that it uses a weird format, you have to have the checksum of the game to save the cheat file and raw hexadecimal memory locations.
While there were many versions of cheat files out there written by others, they =ALL= had the same problem ! While it show my player's hit points at 255 scrolling past the little area where it's supposed to appear, even though the visual value never went down, I let a team of monsters pound on me for a few minutes with THE SAME RESULTS. My player died again.
So I tried to do it manually, converting Action Replay codes to raw hexadecimal using OMNICONVERT, designed just for this purpose. But it failed two different ways. Either it crashed the emulator or while it didn't show my hits go down, interally they did and my player died again.
So TO MY KNOWLEGE =NO ONE= has actually ever made a cheat for Dark Cloud which gives the player infinite Hits !!
But don't knock it - there's a bunch of other good cheat values for this great game other people have found including weapons that don't break and you never get thirsty.
The file is called 0BAA8DD8.pnach - Google it if you're interested.
So at this point I am finally using a program called, CheatEngine64. Bring up PCSX2 first. Load Dark Cloud, press [ESC] to pause it once loaded. Then load the Cheat Engine.
In Cheat Engine, click on the left-most icon that looks like a little computer.
Find and select the active PCSX2 application, then add the following information:
Name: Infinite Hits
Address: 21CEBE5E
Value: 70
Then return to RESUME in PCSX2 to truly lock the hit points so they never decrease, visually or otherwise.
Yet - I am hoping someone will make an updated *.pnach cheat file as this is standard with PCSX2 and am surprised no-one actually took the time to check and ensure the hits are not just invisibly decreasing, including the people who made cheat DISCs that have the codes hardwired - they all DO NOT WORK on this very one particular game.
Research: Too many days to solve this.