Hi! I run games in Wine. I also enjoy hacking games. One of the problems I have when hacking games is that windows makes it rather difficult to hook the program and make your hacks more sneaky, and to do so you must (from my knowledge) create a kernel module: Windows kernel module coding is suicide.

I read up on wine a while ago and found that it actually maps the process memory very similar (if not identical) to how other processes in linux do. My goal was now to write the hack in linux and completely circumvent the win32 api all together. This will work wonders for reading data, which is all I want to do, and I'll leave writing data, breakpoints, etc. for a later time.

I am currently using ptrace (man ptrace(2)) to peek/poke memory. This is rather unfortunate because my hack exists in a separate address space, and communicating between the two seems dumb. I wish to somehow use another process's memory map in some way, hopefully by remapping some segment of my process. Is this possible, or is there a better way(tm)?

Some ideas I had where to investigate or use /proc/<pid>/map or /proc/<pid>/mem in some way.

Cheers,
Kris

Once you start to ptrace a process, you are granted permission to use /proc/$PID/mem directly. You can even mmap() it and have access to matching structs and classes through your own variables.

Thanks, I'll be sure to look into using mmap. Does anyone know much about using shared libraries to attach to a process, similar to DLL injection on win32? I've read about dlopen, libdl, and injectso, but seems rather poorly documented (especially the stuff about the lib entry point) and obscure.

Cheers,
Kris

I think the closes thing we have to that is LD_PRELOAD, which lets you specify libraries which override default libraries when looking up symbols (e.g., if you have the symbol fopen, and the C library has the symbol fopen, yours will be given precedence when the target application tries to resolve the symbol, effectively giving you control). The library itself still has the ability to use the C library functions however.

Interesting topic. Would you mind sharing which games you have hacked, and which you want to work on under wine/linux?

Actually, I was not clear on this, the library must dlopen the C library, and explicitly use dlsym to obtain the desired symbol.