Using Cheat Engine with Games via Proton

Cheating in video games is fine as long as it doesn’t impact the enjoyment of others. If its a singleplayer game and if your playthough only matters to you, why shouldn’t you be able to modify it in any way you see fit? However, the second you start impacting others, say by cheating in multiplayer games to get an unfair advantage or cheating to get better placements on speedrun leaderboards, this is where it becomes not okay. Everyone else is playing by fair rules, you should too.

Cheat Engine is such a great piece of software. Its incredibly powerful, has tons of documentation explaining it, has a large community that writes and shares cheats, its source is available, and its 100% free. Whats not to love? Well, it doesn’t support Linux. Not in any satisfying manner at least. You can run it through Wine and then have it hook into Linux programs via a separate server application, but its clunky and often fails. While alternatives exist (Shout outs to GameConqueror and PINCE for running naively on Linux), sometimes you just want Cheat Engine.

Well, why cant you just launch your game then run Cheat Engine from Wine? It’s not that easy, as Cheat Engine from Wine can only interaction with applications inside the Wine sandbox (Note: Wine doesn’t actually do any proper sandboxing, but it still has some limitations, hence my usage of the word). This is why I said you needed to run some server program to interact with Linux programs. But if you’re trying to use it with a Windows game, whats the issue? Well, assuming you’re launching from Steam, that game is going to be running under Proton, not Wine. Its a separate sandbox, so Cheat Engine won’t be able to see it. How can we get around this?

We just need to launch Cheat Engine with Proton. That way Cheat Engine and our game exist inside of the same sandbox and will be able to interact. Unfortunately, Steam doesn’t make it easy to launch multiple things at once in an intuitive way, so here’s how I went about it:

1. Install Cheat Engine with Wine

This is pretty simple. Go ahead and download the lastest version from the official website. Make sure to decline all the adware the installer is bundled with. Its a straight forward install process.

2. Move it to your Steam directory

This step may sound weird, but I couldn’t get it to work otherwise. You should be able to find your install of Cheat Engine in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Cheat Engine. From there, copy that entire folder and move it to ~/.local/share/Steam/ or ~/.steam/steam/ or wherever Steam is storing its files on your system. To make future steps easier, it does help to remove any spaces in the folder for Cheat Engine.

3. Modify your launch options

Now go ahead and open Steam and find your game. Remember, the game must use Proton to run, meaning it cannot be a native Linux game. Once you find it, open its properties and edit its launch options to be (similar) to the following: PROTON_REMOTE_DEBUG_CMD="~/.local/share/Steam/CheatEngine/cheatengine-x86_64-SSE4-AVX2.exe" %command% There should be a valid path to where you placed Cheat Engine in the previous step, and it should point to an executable in that folder. I’ve had the best luck with this specific one, but changing it up might have different results.

4. Launch your game

After launching your game, Cheat Engine should launch along side it. From there, its just like using Cheat Engine as you normally would. Its that simple. If you want to launch it with other games, simply add previous statement to your launch options and it should work. Enjoy your gaming!