Trainer Toolkit DS

To cheat or not to cheat? It's a question that's split gamers for decades.

In most circles it's a practice that's looked down upon. Still, very few of us can actually say cheating is a practice we've never indulged in. Sometimes it's only by using cheats that you can get the most out of a game without feeling unnecessarily punished or frustrated. Even so, it's hard to cheat without feeling, well, dirty.

While Datel's Trainer Toolkit is a cheat device at heart, at least it offers the caveat you'll be discovering the cheats yourself, which can be a challenge in and of itself. The process provides a fascinating look into the hidden workings of how a game is constructed.

Designed for the DS, the Trainer Toolkit comes with the GBA cart known as a 'dev-board'. This goes into the GBA slot of your DS and is used to 'train' the game via a USB connection to your PC (the cable is supplied). More commonly referring to as, ahem, hacking, training using the dev-board means you can analyse what happens when you play a game and then, hopefully, modify it. In this way, theoretically, any aspect of a game can be changed.

But in order to use the Trainer Toolkit, you'll also have to own one of Datel's Action Replay DS products. (The Action Replay is a device that uses the cheat codes supplied by Datel.) After booting up your DS with the dev-board in the GBA slot and connected to your PC and the Action Replay in the DS game slot, you replace the Action Replay cart with the game you want to train. Using Datel's PC software (Windows only), you can then read the memory of the DS as you play the game.

It's at this point the whole process can become quite overwhelming. The screen fills with lines of hex code and it can be hard to know where to begin. Thankfully, Datel includes an excellent user manual, which explains the various techniques used for training games.

My first attempt was with Nintendo's Touch Golf. I've never been very good at golf, so creating a cheat that meant a hole-in-one every time seemed like a good place to start.

Firstly, the memory from the game is 'dumped' using the PC software. Then I teed off in the game and told the Trainer Toolkit to only show memory locations that had increased in value since the last dump. Obviously, this narrows results down to memory locations that could represent the total number of shots taken.

You keep repeating this process until the number of possible memory locations left becomes low enough to enable you to use trial-and-error to find the correct location for the number of shots taken. Then you can simply construct the cheat code for that memory location. This is applied to the game, in real-time, so you can check it works.

The procedure may sound bewildering, but the simple software and clear instructions make it far less daunting than it appears, and my attempt at making a cheat code to get a hole-in-one was successful. (If only improving my real life golf handicap was this easy.)

However, training isn't always smooth. For example, the Trainer Toolkit was originally advertised as including a wizard mode to make the process even easier for first time users. This doesn't appear to have made it to the finished product. Maybe it's something that can be added in future updates of the software, and the comprehensive manual generally makes up for its absence, but it's clearly a shortcoming for newbies.

The sort of hole-in-one cheat I created is quite basic, although there was an immense level of satisfaction in making it. You can get much more involved – to a degree you can consider the Action Replay codes as being something of a programming language.

Taking game training to the next level is covered in detail in the user manual, with examples given for games so you can try them out step-by-step. If you want to put together a cheat to modify the height of your jumps in Yoshi's Island DS or the power of your bombs in Metroid Prime Hunters, the tools are at your disposal. The only real limit is your imagination and comfort with basic programming techniques.

And who says your cheats have to make the game easier, anyway? If you think you're an expert, you could make a game more challenging, by reducing the power of your weapons or reducing the time limits.

All-in-all, Trainer Toolkit is a really interesting package. It's probably not for most DS owners though. If you just want to get the obvious cheats for your DS games, Datel's Action Replay DS which costs £19.99, covers most of the games you'll need, and is regularly updated with new codes and new games.

If however you're interested in how games are made, or desperately want cheats for those obscure Japanese games you're importing, the Trainer Toolkit, which costs £29,99, is well worth investigating.