Finding Address of Clock/Timer in NFSPU - Need help

[asprin]

First of all i would like to thank DABhand for writing a tutorial on usage of cheat engine.Because of you, i gathered enough courage to play with the dma phenomena. Hats off to you.

After going through this website, i found out out how to find address for a known value as well as for health bars...i also succeeded in freezing them...thanks to you folks for that.

Now i am trying to go one step further and trying to find the address for a clock that keeps ticking and never freezes.

The game i am working on is Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed. I am not able to find the address of the timer. The format of the clock is 00-00-00, the first set for minutes, second set for seconds and third set for milliseconds.

I tried with unknown values using every data length but to no avail. I first tried with increased value since the time is increasing in the game. Then i also tried using decreasing values but still couldnt get the result.

Please help me out on this. I am using Cheat Engine v5.3.

Thanks and Regards,
asprin.

[TippeX]

could also be floats
or stored as 64 bit value, microseconds etc..
which it then divides runtime, to do the display

alternatively, most of the games use wsprintf to do the actual formatting
so u could look through the code for stuff like '%2d:%2d:%2d' and cross reference them...

[DABhand]

Just remember 1 minute is 60 seconds, 1 hour is 3600 seconds and so on.

And yes it could be set to milliseconds, or tenths of a second. So you will have to do a bit of experimenting to find out :)

[asprin]

hmmm it looks like i will have to do a lot of searching.....no problem i will certainly not back out of it now....thanks for replying

[asprin]

no luck at all...i tried every possible permutations and combinations but invain...how the hell do i find a solution to it?

[DABhand]

The olde slow but sure method.

Search for an unknown, then decrease value after a second, and again and again.

Will take longer but hopefully you will get there.

Sometimes timers can be either

1. Float
2. Seperate Byte values for each time. i.e. 1 byte value for minutes, 1 for seconds etc

[asprin]

yeh but there is also a millisecond field in the timer. Does that mean i will have convert minutes and seconds to milliseconds too?

[TippeX]

i would imagine so

[asprin]

guys i found out one important thing regarding the format of the timer.

The format is 00:00.00 and not 00:00:00 as mentioned by me earlier. SO any suggesstions on datatype, length?

Thanks and Regards,
asprin.