Operating Systems

What's an Operating System?

Our operating system is a program that will manage all our programms/apps on our computer, after it has been launched by a boot loader.

Interfaces

A user interacts with their operating system using something called a "UI" (User Interface) or "GUI" (Graphical User Interface).

Things that could be considered a UI could be what we know as a "Command Line" or "Command Line Interface" and something that's considered a GUI could be for example the windows start menu (Press your windows key).

The Operating System also allows Applications to communicate with it, you might be familiar with the term "API", Application Programming Interface. This basically allows to establish a sort of "connection" between the caller and a program that has a distinct functions, enabling them to share data with one-another.

You will usually find a API documentation detailing how to request and respond with data.

Handling Programs

The Operating system has to make sure that your programs can run. The RAM (Random Access Memory) is where our programms actually run.

RAM is basically the short-term memory of a computer. It can access it faster than your Disk, SSD or other devices, that are capable of storing data.

If we wanted to load up our game, we would double-click the file. The Operating system then finds the file and loads it from our storage-space into RAM.

That's why Memory editing doesn't change anything permanently, because we're modifying the data that's loaded into memory.

Whenever you edit something on your disk, the changes are permanent. For example, when we edit a save-file on our disk to gain some extra in-game cash.

Access and Control

Because our Operating System manages the majority of our Hardware, we gain a lot of control over our system. With all this control, we can use the Operating System to our advantage when it comes to game-hacking.

If we tell our Operating System we want to change our ammo from 10 to 20, it will do that for us, as long as we give it the correct location. It doesn't care if we want to cheat in a game, the only thing what matters is what we tell it to do.

Cheat Engine and other programms work exactly this way. They talk to your Operating System and modify your data with things like RPM (Read Process Memory) and WPM (Write Process Memory).