CheatRunner/CHANGELOG.md

CheatRunner — Changelog

v0.18

• Added: 16 languages with flags and a language picker; Arabic and Persian read right to left.
• Added: controller shortcut and a "★ CheatRunner" game-menu entry that open a game's trainer (off by default).
• Added: download the official PS-Game-Patch release from Sources.
• Added: cheat repositories download as one archive with a live progress panel; unchanged files are skipped.
• Added: XML patches placed in /data/cheatrunner/patches are recognized, in any letter case.
• Added: title ID, PS5/PS4 badge, version, time played and last played on every game card.
• Added: Visual effects setting (Full / Reduced); Reduced is the default in the PS5 browser.
• Added: command palette (Ctrl/Cmd+K), collapsible menu and a QR code to open the dashboard on a phone.
• Added: update notice, and Discord, X, Bluesky and Support buttons in the top bar.
• Added: Sources links to hencheats.vercel.app and PS-Game-Patch.
• Added: a tip in the Patches tab and the README about patches that only work at game start.
• Added: a health summary in System and a Troubleshooting section in Settings.
• Added: step-by-step debug logs for the system-UI hooks; the log level defaults to debug and the log file keeps every session.
• Added: a short build id in the log header and version line, so each session shows which ELF was running.
• Changed: build-cheatrunner.sh shows one progress line, prints the end of the log when the build fails, and has --clean, --sqlite, --no-sqlite, -j and --verbose.
• Added: the log shows the original and new bytes of every patch line.
• Changed: cheats turn on and off with a single click; address modes, the address cache and the verify/force options are gone.
• Changed: a version or address mismatch no longer locks a cheat's switch.
• Changed: new dashboard with a left menu, a full-page trainer (Cheats / Patches / Files) and a shorter Settings page.
• Changed: Midnight is the default theme, and the dashboard uses the system font.
• Changed: "HEN Cheats Collection" is marked Recommended in Sources.
• Changed: long lists load in batches and covers are small cached thumbnails, so the PS5 browser stays smooth.
• Changed: autoload waits 1 second after every cheat and patch it turns on.
• Changed: UI polish — motion, loading skeletons, dialogs, filters and phone layouts.
• Changed: the system-UI hook waits 10 s after the shell's libraries load and follows new shell processes, including after rest mode.
• Changed: the system-UI hooks are written from inside the shell in one step and skipped when they can't be placed safely.
• Changed: CheatRunner stops hooking after two shell restarts that follow a failed injection and shows a notice.
• Changed: new dashboard look with a readiness strip on the trainer page, a slimmer top bar and clear empty and error states.
• Changed: the dashboard keeps its effects in desktop and modern browsers, and the PS5 browser uses the lighter Reduced preset until you pick Full in Settings.
• Changed: Discord, X, Bluesky and a labelled Support button are back in the top bar, and cheat and patch authors are shown prominently.
• Added: a download in progress shows in the top bar on every page.
• Added: new names to the supporters list.
• Changed: the Support text is larger and easier to read, and the heart floats again (not in the Reduced preset).
• Changed: CheatRunner.elf is about 3.5 MB smaller (smaller logo, lossless tile images, unused code removed at link time, bundled libraries built for size).
• Removed: unused code, including the old online cheat search and its /api/sources/jobs, /api/cheats/sources and /api/cheats/remote/* endpoints.
• Added: CheatRunner Patches repository in Sources, with a patch source picker.
• Changed: when a game has patches from both repositories, only the CheatRunner Patches ones are listed; they are saved in their own cheatrunner subfolders, so PS-Game-Patch never overwrites them.
• Fixed: a cheat file that failed to load was shown as missing, and a failed state read left the switches off without saying why.
• Changed: CheatRunner never restarts or kills the system UI anymore; hooks left by an earlier session are reused.
• Changed: hooking the system UI no longer alters the shell's own permissions, keeps its extra rights only while working, and the hook stays marked as installed even if the handshake fails.
• Changed: "Report an issue" opens the GitHub issue tracker, and builds use the Makefile only.
• Fixed: the version and name of homebrew games mounted from a folder were not detected, so their cheats showed "version undetected".
• Fixed: cheats with a long Mastercode name (for example The Witcher 3) showed their sub-cheats as conflicting; turning one on switched the Mastercode off and on again.
• Fixed: cheats and patches with large byte strings could not be enabled.
• Fixed: patch XML files were not found (names with spaces or brackets, new files, sub-folders).
• Fixed: XML patches that jump into a code cave could crash the game.
• Fixed: a patch with a pattern line that finds no match is no longer undone entirely; the lines that match are applied.
• Fixed: the controller shortcut and the ★ menu on firmware 4.xx, where the system UI has more modules than the hook could list.
• Fixed: downloaded cheat files with a hash or process name after the version (for example PPSA31246_01.200.000_ef4d3664.mc4) lost their version and matched any game version.
• Fixed: cheats and patches on firmware 13.60.
• Fixed: the Patches tab reloaded and jumped when a patch was applied or restored.
• Fixed: game covers cut off or missing in the PS5 browser.
• Fixed: laggy scrolling, blue lines after switching tabs and a cut-off Autoload pill in the PS5 browser.
• Fixed: the dashboard layout on phones, especially in Arabic and Persian, and the unstyled page when the stylesheet failed to load.
• Fixed: time played and last played now match the PS5 home screen.
• Fixed: the controller shortcut gave up for good after a few rest-mode wakes.
• Fixed: system-UI crashes and restarts caused by injection (a stalled injection, unsupported instructions, restarting CheatRunner).
• Fixed: the ★ menu entry was sometimes missing after a game launch.
• Fixed: the controller shortcut restarting the system UI after the shell opened its own web processes.
• Fixed: a new CheatRunner could not replace the running one, and the browser could keep an old dashboard.
• Fixed: downloads stop with a clear message when files cannot be saved.
• Fixed: the D-pad works right away in the PS5 browser.
• Removed: the Create-button shortcut, "Find cheats online", "Copy cheats folder", the profile editor, thermals and fan panel, and the notification bell.

v0.17.2

• Fixed: writes on FW 13.60.

v0.17.1

• Added: support for 13.60 firmware — rebuilt against the latest ps5-payload-sdk.

v0.17

• Fixed: the trainer/cheat menu, Settings page, and Support/donate popup could silently fail to appear on some PS5 firmwares (reported on 4.03) — the "Cheat menu loaded" toast would show, but the menu itself never appeared, same for Settings and Support. Root cause, confirmed against that firmware's actual WebKit source: every full-screen overlay in the dashboard positioned itself with the CSS inset shorthand, which is gated behind WebKit's CSSLogicalEnabled runtime flag — off by default in this build. With inset silently dropped, the overlay never got a top/right/bottom/left, so it had no size or position to render at, regardless of display/visibility/opacity. (Two earlier attempts in this same release — switching display:none to visibility/opacity, then adding a transition — treated it as a compositing/paint timing issue and didn't address this.) Replaced inset with explicit top/right/bottom/left everywhere it was used for positioning (the three overlays, plus several decorative background/glow/shimmer effects that had the same silent failure but went unnoticed since they're cosmetic). Confirmed fixed on the reporting user's PS5.
• Fixed: the Settings page's ON/OFF toggle switches were too cramped for the text, and the green "ON" fill sat slightly off-center — a CSS math bug on every toggle switch in the app, not just Settings.
• Second PS5 browser performance pass, focused on scroll smoothness. Game tiles, buttons, and switches no longer permanently promote to their own GPU layer — a real scroll-jank source with dozens of tiles on screen, now disabled on PS5 only. Game icons lazy-load, decode off the main thread, and get resized to display size server-side on first cache instead of shipping the full 512×512 source. Search is debounced instead of rebuilding the grid on every keystroke, the health panel stops re-rendering every 10 seconds while collapsed, and a few more always-on animations are now disabled on PS5.
• The trainer/cheat menu now goes fullscreen on the PS5 browser instead of a centered dialog with wasted space on a TV. PC/desktop keeps the centered layout.
• The hotkey now opens straight to the trainer for the game currently running, instead of the dashboard's main page. From the XMB, with no game running, it still opens the main page.
• Added a controller hotkey. Hold two buttons together to open the CheatRunner dashboard in the system browser — L2 + R3 by default, configurable from Settings → Hotkey. Re-hooks automatically within ~20 seconds after rest mode or a SceShellUI restart.
• Fixed: the hotkey could stop responding to a changed combo, or stop working entirely, if SceShellUI still had a hook resident from an earlier session. Now detected — SceShellUI restarts once automatically to clear it.
• Fixed: launching CheatRunner while an instance was already running didn't kill the old one, requiring a manual shutdown from the dashboard first.
• Fixed: the hotkey could crash SceShellUI (XMB) instead of hooking in, on some firmwares. The injector freed a scratch memory region the instant setup finished — but a newly-created thread reaching that point only means it was created, not done bootstrapping onto its own stack. It could still be touching that memory, and freeing it corrupted unrelated state and crashed SceShellUI. Confirmed fixed on PS5.
• Hardened the hotkey's Mono module lookup to use a fixed-size buffer instead of a heap allocation, avoiding a possible interaction with SceShellUI's own memory allocator.
• Fixed: three of the six names in the Support modal's "Special thanks" list were animating in sync instead of independently — a missing per-name delay left the 1st, 5th, and 6th names sharing the same phase.
• Added an "Enable hotkey" switch in Settings → Hotkey, off by default. On some firmwares (seen on 4.xx) the hook can still crash SceShellUI despite the fix above — the rest of CheatRunner works fully with it off; turn it on once you've confirmed it's stable on your firmware.
• Fixed a garbled "…" character ("Search settings…", the health panel's "Loading…") showing as mojibake on the PS5 browser — replaced with plain periods.

v0.16

Removed the "Disable All Patches" button. It disabled patches for every game on the console at once, which was confusing and easy to trigger by accident. Patches now enable/disable per-entry only, the same as cheats.

• Fixed: "CheatRunner is not responding" errors reported by several users. Root cause: HTTP keep-alive (added late in v0.15) held connections open far longer than before, and the PS5 browser doesn't reuse them the way keep-alive expects — this could exhaust the concurrent-connection limit under normal polling. Reverted back to closing each connection after one request.
• Added a setting to disable the home-screen tile auto-install (Settings → System). On by default, matching the existing behavior.
• Fixed: "Download Cheats" searches could fail with "Request timed out" even when the search was still completing fine in the background — a single flaky status check no longer cancels the whole search.
• Raised the HTTP server's connection backlog (8 → 32) to reduce refused connections during bursts of simultaneous requests.
• Reorganized the Repositories tab layout for clarity, and fixed its progress bar/result colors not respecting the active theme.
• The Repositories tab now shows which files failed to verify after a bulk download, plus when the last download finished.
• Added a "Reset to Auto" button for the fan-on threshold (Thermals & Fan panel) — clears a pinned threshold and lets the console's automatic fan curve take back over.
• Fixed a DNS resolution security weakness. Query IDs were predictable, and the socket wasn't restricted to the server it queried, both making responses easier to spoof.
• Dashboard now serves gzip-compressed HTML/CSS/JS when the browser supports it — faster page loads, especially on the PS5 browser.
• Added cheat autoload profiles. Save your currently-enabled cheats for a game as a profile, and CheatRunner automatically re-applies them the next time that game launches, with an on-screen notification when it fires.
• Replaced "Copy Cheat Debug" and "Copy Diagnostic Bundle" with a single "Copy Logs" button in the trainer modal, matching the one already on the Logs panel.
• Added patch autoload profiles. Save your currently-applied patches for a game as a profile, and CheatRunner automatically re-applies them the next time that game launches, same as cheat autoload profiles.
• Added an "Autoload" badge on game tiles for titles with a saved cheat and/or patch autoload profile, so you can tell at a glance without opening the trainer.
• Patch autoload now always finishes before cheat autoload starts on game launch (previously both fired at the same time), so cheats that depend on a patched code path never race against the patch itself.

v0.15

• Added mask_jump32 patch support. Previously parsed but always skipped as unsupported, silently no-op'ing several real patches (multiple "60 FPS"/"Resolution Patch" entries).
• Added a "Switch to Max Compatibility" prompt when a cheat fails to enable due to an unverifiable address. Doesn't change any defaults — only offers the existing preset at the moment it would help.
• Added trainer author credits to the cheat menu ("Cheats By") for JSON, SHN, and MC4 files.
• Fixed: SHN/MC4 game names with an apostrophe (e.g. "Assassin's Creed") were truncated in the cheat menu.
• Fixed: cheats depending on a "Master Code" mod could resolve to the wrong address and fail silently, including a case where a dependent's own name confused master-code detection. Also fixes the dashboard's MISMATCH badge showing incorrectly for these cheats.
• Fixed: cheat/patch writes silently failed on firmware newer than 12.00.
• Fixed: some valid cheats sharing a code-cave block with other mods were wrongly blocked as "wrong address."
• Fixed: cheat entries with a dropped leading hex zero (e.g. "1" instead of "01") failed to parse and silently did nothing.
• Added a network watchdog that recovers faster after sleep/wake or Wi-Fi reconnects, and notifies you when the console's IP changes.
• Added an OLED theme — true black background and panels, and noticeably less glow/decorative lines than the default Dark theme.
• Session logs are now saved to /data/cheatrunner/logs.txt, not just kept in memory — makes it possible to check what happened after a crash or a restart wiped the in-app log view.
• Fixed: "Shutdown Payload" could silently hang forever instead of closing CheatRunner, if a cheat apply was stuck at the exact moment shutdown was requested. Shutdown now always completes within a couple seconds either way.
• Enlarged the header logo and made its glow match the active theme's color instead of always being red.
• Fixed: the Cheats/Repositories/Patches tabs in the trainer modal could render as squashed, oversized capsules on the PS5 browser.
• Attempted fix for a PS5-browser-only bug where the trainer modal's Patches/Repositories lists couldn't be scrolled down to reach lower content — improved but not fully confirmed resolved on PS5 yet.
• Fixed: a Master Code cheat could show a false "Conflicts with active mod" against its own dependent, blocking it from being enabled, when the dependent's own name also mentioned "Master Code."
• Fixed: cheats that require a Master Code showed a confusing "VERSION MISMATCH" (and couldn't be toggled) before the Master Code was enabled — now shows a clear "requires Master Code first" state instead.
• Fixed: a Master Code's own button showed a false "PARTIAL PATCH" once its dependent cheats were enabled and writing into its shared cave, even though everything was working correctly.
• Fixed: the Settings popup could fail to open/render on the PS5 browser the same way the trainer modal did — it was missing a fix already applied elsewhere.
• Game icons are now cached by the browser instead of being re-downloaded every time the dashboard loads — faster repeat loads, especially on the PS5 browser.
• Settings theme dropdown now shows proper names ("Dark", "Crimson", "Midnight", "OLED") instead of raw internal values.

v0.14

• CheatRunner's home-screen tile now installs into Media Players instead of the Games library, plus a follow-up param.json audit (badge type, locale key, DRM type) found by comparing PS5's own app database against a known Media-tab app.
• Fixed: dashboard updates (new buttons, PS5 perf fixes) weren't showing up on PS5s that had already loaded the page — the AppCache manifest wasn't being bumped every release, and no JS handler existed to actually swap in an updated cache when one was detected. Both fixed.
• PS5 browser performance pass. Removed Google Fonts (blocking external font load), added HTTP caching for static assets, replaced backdrop-filter blur with solid backgrounds, hid decorative background layers, converted several box-shadow/clip-path animations to cheap opacity/transform-only ones, disabled tile-stagger and a couple of scan-line animations during cheat toggle/launch, and stopped tile-selection from rebuilding the entire game grid on every click.
• Migrated the memory read/write engine from ptrace to mdbg. ptrace required stopping the whole game process for every read/write, and two threads attaching at once could corrupt an in-progress patch — this was the root cause of games freezing mid-cheat-apply. Confirmed fixed on PS5. Added a CR3-walk fallback for firmware 8.20+, where Sony's native mdbg write call silently stops working.
• Went fully mdbg-only in the write path — kernel_mprotect and the old ptrace-based code-cave remap fallback were removed entirely from writes.
• Full security/reliability audit (~22k lines). Removed dead HTTP auth code that was never wired up, closed a shutdown race that could interrupt an in-flight write, and fixed several smaller bugs: an undefined-behavior shift in patch hex parsing, a duplicate constant, a signed-overflow bug in address math, an unguarded config read, and cross-module false positives in conflict detection.
• Fixed two real kernel-panic/console-freeze incidents, both reproduced on PS5 and traced to kernel_mprotect itself (not page-protection state) corrupting kernel memory on certain addresses. kernel_mprotect was removed from both the write path and the execute-only-memory read fallback; the patch mask-pattern scanner no longer scans past the first unreadable memory chunk.
• Fixed a rapid-toggling freeze, where a stalled PS5 notification call could lock up the entire cheat-apply subsystem because it ran while holding the apply lock. Also reduced the HTTP server's per-request memory allocation from a flat 4 MB to a small buffer that grows only when needed.
• Added Maffioh to the Support modal's "Special thanks" list.
• Bumped to 0.14.

v0.13

• Fixed: cheats/patches targeting execute-only game code (.text) always showed as unreadable/mismatched, even when correctly applied. Reads now temporarily unlock the page, read, and restore its original protection. (This approach was later replaced in v0.14 for stability reasons.)
• Added a crash log. SIGSEGV/SIGBUS are now caught and appended to /data/cheatrunner/crash.log instead of the daemon dying with no trace.
• Added a Thermals & Fan panel — live CPU/SoC/NVMe temperatures, a manual fan-on threshold slider (persisted across launches/reboots), and a °C/°F toggle.
• Added a User Profile panel — rename the active user and change their profile picture directly from the dashboard.
• CheatRunner now installs its own home-screen tile automatically on first boot.
• Fixed: "Memory Patch — Not Ready" was shown even on a fully working jailbreak — a status field was missing from the API response the dashboard actually reads.
• Fixed two off-by-one bugs in process-list scanning that could make CheatRunner miss its own process or the running game's pid on certain kernel versions.
• Fixed: payload redeploys could fail to reclaim the HTTP port from a stuck previous instance; the port is now released immediately instead of waiting on the old process.
• Removed two long-dead, riskier write functions in favor of the one path everything already used; upgraded the address-guessing heuristic from checking 1 instruction byte to 2, cutting false positives significantly.
• Live download progress for remote cheat sources; a warning toast when results come from a stale cached index.
• Collapsible, reorderable sidebar panels; fonts (Space Grotesk/Inter/JetBrains Mono) that were configured but never actually loading now load correctly.
• The running game is now pinned to the top of the game grid; tiles show playtime or last-played date; profile picture upload gained a crop/pan/zoom step before saving.
• Supporter credits added to the Support modal.

v0.12

• Fixed bind() failed: 48 dashboard disconnects. CheatRunner tried to kill a previous instance of itself before escalating its own privileges, so the kill was silently rejected and the old instance kept holding the port forever. The kill now happens after escalation, and failed binds retry with a clear, bounded message instead of spamming forever.
• Ptrace stability audit — fixed a credential-elevation race across three threads that could leave CheatRunner's process permanently over- or under-privileged, a competing attach between the game monitor and an in-progress cheat apply, and an address-cache buffer size bug that silently dropped the entire learned-address cache.
• Fixed "CheatRunner is busy" / "not responding" under game load (mainly PS4 BC titles) — dashboard polling could spawn enough hung ptrace-attach threads to exhaust the server's thread pool. Added liveness checks, skips polling while an apply is in progress, and shortened timeouts.
• Fixed a crash from concurrent thumbnail requests — SQLite is compiled non-thread-safe in this build, and loading many game icons at once could corrupt its internal state and crash the whole daemon. Now serialized behind a lock.
• Fixed the HTTP server not reconnecting after PS5 sleep/wake and a related crash-detection gap where a dead game process could still be reported as running.
• MC4/SHN address-resolution and cave-writing bugs, several fixed the same week: a poisoned address cache could brick every mod in a cheat file instead of self-healing; code-cave pages were stripped of write permission after a cheat was applied, freezing the game the next time it wrote to that page; multiple "Master Code" groups in one file could resolve against the wrong group; a scan fallback could compute an address missing its module base entirely, landing on arbitrary memory; and the allow_legacy_* "I accept the risk" settings didn't fully apply to every guard that should have respected them.
• Added an x86-instruction heuristic to auto-pick the correct address for SHN/MC4 cheats with no verified baseline — reads a few candidate bytes and picks whichever looks like real code, instead of guessing.
• Added an address-learning cache so resolved addresses don't need to be re-probed on every apply.
• Enabled code-cave fallback and master-code auto-fixup by default, and added cave-overwrite/JMP-redirect support so switching between mutually-exclusive cheats (e.g. Speed Normal/3x/5x) no longer requires a game restart.
• Patch engine hardening: the per-patch line cap was silently truncating large patches (some 60 FPS patches have 100+ lines) — raised from 64 to 640 lines. Fixed a kernel panic and a separate SIGILL crash in the PS4 BC patch-write and XML-parsing paths, added full backup/rollback (all-or-nothing) with hard failure on verify mismatch, and blocked applying patches with unsupported or zero usable lines instead of silently no-op'ing them.
• Patch engine now supports multiple XML files per title (including a new elf-arsenal search path), with stable IDs so applied-state survives rescans.
• Dashboard overhaul: animated tab switching, refreshed icons/buttons/focus states, loading skeletons, a Favorites/Recents system with first-run onboarding, and a full Settings redesign — one-click Safe/Max Compatibility/Debug presets, plain-language labels, risk warnings on dangerous toggles, search, and reset-to-defaults.
• Smaller fixes: shutdown now uses SIGKILL instead of a graceful exit that could hang; crash suspects and disabled-cheat state now persist across restarts; a concurrent-write race could corrupt cached files (icons, address cache) sharing the same temp-file name; game version detection now checks more paths and no longer probes a kernel path that could panic older firmware; PlayStation Store lookup as a last-resort title-name source.

v0.11

• Reduced log noise significantly — several very chatty per-write and per-poll log lines were downgraded to debug level or throttled to fire only on change, cutting routine log volume by roughly 5–10x.
• Split the dashboard's HTML/CSS/JS into separate files served at their own routes, shrinking the main HTML shell from ~3000 lines to under 200.
• Fixed PS4 BC cheat writes failing silently — added a fallback write path for pages where the standard permission query isn't supported.
• Version detection improvements — now checks more SFO/param paths (including update/patch and external-drive locations) and warns once per game instead of spamming when a version genuinely can't be found.
• Added a launch-status generation counter so a stale, slow-to-complete launch attempt can no longer overwrite the status of a newer one; added a watchdog that auto-recovers a launch stuck in "busy" past a timeout.
• Centralized cheat-file version matching into one shared comparison function, fixing several inconsistent-match edge cases (leading zeros, trailing .0 segments, unparseable strings silently "matching").
• Added manual cheat-file selection — when auto-selection doesn't pick the right version, you can now force a specific candidate file, with a visible mismatch warning if you do.
• Compatibility: added /data/etaHEN/cheats and /data/elf-arsenal/cheats as cheat search paths.
• Cheat engine stability fixes — a fast double-attach race, a stuck "no cheat file" error after a game restart, and a false "bytes mismatch" that blocked disabling MC4/SHN cheats with no explicit expected-bytes baseline.
• Added remote cheat source downloads — cheats can now be fetched automatically from configured repositories on game launch.
• Added a SQLite-backed game list, title-name resolution, playtime/activity tracking, and a redesigned sliding ON/OFF toggle switch with proper mixed/error/applying states.

v0.1

• Initial release
• ptrace-based memory write engine (pt_copyin / pt_copyout)
• Cheat format support: JSON, SHN/XML, MC4 (AES-256-CBC encrypted XML)
• Basic cheat enable / disable via HTTP API
• Game process detection and monitoring