adventurerus

Hey, thanks for the response, I'm glad that someone else's interested. I can't believe I didn't think of searching for decreasing values to find the fuel level. It's great that you can now have infinite health. I couldn't find the addresses you were talking about, but I did find something better - an address that starts at 39 each time that keeps track of your health and works for every level. Just search for 39 and decreasing value each time and you'll find it. I'll try to beat the game with it and write back. The problem seems to be the size of the ball, as you sometimes have to deinflate to go through tiny gaps. Maybe I can somehow use the addresses I found to control the size without changing health. I'll test that. No idea how I missed the part where he says that there's no ending, I did read the instructions. But if there's no end, what's the ball graphic I found? It's incredibly simillar to the end of helious I. There's only one way to find out. Edit - if you get the health value down to 10 or something and then press the checkbox to deactivate it, it remains the same size and invincible. Still afraid of instadeath, but this is way easier now. Edit edit - I literally did that a second before BTGbullseye posted it =) Edit edit edit - something weird just happened. I died on a level due to instadeath, reentered it, and my ball was the right size. I looked at the first four health values I found, and they were stuck at 34. I quit the level, and for some reason now there's a new knuckle joint added to my tentacle thing. No idea what happened there, I'm going to try to replicate the events. Edit edit edit edit - Did that again just now, nothing happened and it took away my knuckle joint. 'Nice'. Edit edit edit edit edit - I realized what causes the anomaly. For some reason, the purple and yellow levels don't work like all the others. When I enter them, my ball is big, takes damage like normal, and the four health values are stuck at 34 for purple and 80 for yellow (except for F3, which is stuck at 8 and 0 respectively. I have no earthly clue why these levels are different, but they are. Maybe they use a different address? The knuckle joint no longer appears. Edit edit edit edit edit edit - Just got the flag on the blue level. Nothing happend for a while and I hit escape to go back to the tentacle screen. Do I have to do something else? It didn't give me a knuckle joint. When I reenter the level the flag is still there. I remember someone reporting the same problem in the comment section of the helious video here on the forums. No clue what's going on. Edit edit edit edit edit edit edit - I went ahead and completed the pink level just to make sure. It did give me a knuckle joint. I think the problem is that the first time I stuck around for a bit too long and I was supposed to press escape right after I got the flag. Too bad I didn't download the version with savestates yet, but the pink one is easy to beat with infinite health, so that won't be a problem. Okay, I'm done for the day, but that was a good hour or so. The problems now are the purple and yellow levels and the occasional lack of knuckle joints.

Thanks for the response. Google didn't tell me anything about ASM anti-cheat coding or how to disable it (as I said, I'm less than an amateur at this). Can you please write a short instruction on how to recognise and disable it? I think what's happening is this: there are a lot of addresses that access the function that I'm trying to disable, and one or more of them crashes the game. If I'm right (and the Cheat Engine disassembler does show a lot of addresses connected to that function), then I have no idea how to go around that. So far all the addresses I tried to disable crashed the game in their own weird way (even the one that made the balls appear). It may be required to try a different route altogether. I'll post the links to both the game and DOSbox in the original post, so that they're easily accessable to anyone who wants to give them a spin.

(I was not sure where to put this, but this is related to the helious video, so I guess this fits in here) I've been devoting a lot of time to trying to hack Helious II lately. I don't believe in the whole alien story, but the prospect of seeing the ending to a game that noone's beaten before gives me enough passion to continue. I have little programming knowledge or experience with hacking games, so I'm not the most qualified person to do this, which is the reason I'm posting this here instead of continuing to try on my own. I would try to beat the game legitimately if it didn't lag so much on my pc. So far using cheat engine I found four addresses that relate to your health. I can't write them down here because they change each time (probably due to running the game in dosbox). Here's how you find them - enter a level, make sure not to get hit or waste any fuel. Search for the value '10' (make sure to select 'all' in the 'type' dropdown). Then hit some walls or whatever to waste your fuel a bit untill your sprite changes, then search '9' and click 'next scan'. The four addresses you're looking for will always have 'F1', 'F3', '85D' and '86B' on the end. (This is not tested well, but I think F3 controls the size of the ball, while others keep track of your health in some way) While it seemed easy at first to keep refilling your health to cheat through the game, it isn't. I have no idea why, but even if you change the value and deactivate the addresses, they keep springing back to the correct value and killing you. I think that indicates that either there's a part of code preventing you from getting your health back or I don't freeze the values correctly. I tried to disable the code that writes into these addresses, but that just crashes the whole game. If you have any idea how to fix this, please write in. That was sadly all I could find for three days already, so I started to feel down on the whole thing. But just about half an hour ago I came across a VERY exciting thing that made me write all this in the first place. So do the above steps to get to the four health addresses. Go to a stage and don't do anything. Then right click on the address that ends with '86B' and press 'Find out what writes to this address'. You'll see only one instruction. Right click on it and click 'show in the disassembler'. Then right click on it in the disassembler and click 'find out what addresses this instruction accesses'. You'll see a lot of different addresses. You've got to find one that ends with 14 (it's close to the beggining, and its 'count' increases by one each milisecond). Right click on it, copy it to the clipboard, then close everything you just opened. Click 'add address manually', and press ctrl+v. Then disable the address (checkbox on the left). Go to the tentacle screen (level select). Note that sometimes that crashes the game and shows 'Internal error: SLS' Now there are balls flying at the tentacle, just like at the end of the first game! So this is either a portion of the ending, a visual bug, or just a function left over from the first game that was accidentaly left in. Whatever it is, I'm sure if we dig around that address, we'll find the ending or at least some of it. Other things I've tried included using a decompiler, but it's one thing reading someone else's code, and another reading someone else's code on a language you don't know that was used two decades ago and may or may not have been written by aliens. If you know 1995 Borland C++, you can use the 'reko decompiler' to look at the code. I'll keep working on this and update the post each time I find something new. If you'd like to join, have input on something I've found or want to wish me good luck or call me a moron, go ahead and post. Hopefully the ending of this game won't be a mistery for much longer. Download helious II here - http://www.allabout.com/afs/software/games/helious.htm Run it through DOSbox (just drag helious.exe onto dosbox.exe, that's way faster than mounting stuff through the console) - http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1