Can you freeze a games time to complete it?

[CheatExplorer28827]

The title doesn’t make much sense but say you’re a in a game and it has a speed run related achievement for say… completing the game in under 30 minutes… would you be able to edit it so the game wouldn’t be able to recognise it? Like so you could not have to worry about racing to it.

Essentially i want to do exactly that but does the game itself have to have a timer within it to be able to do that? I’ve heard CheatEngine only works with properties that exist in the actual game so I assumed something like time couldn’t be manipulated with as that’s outside the games time but if you could just freeze the game but play it at the same time… is something like that possible?

[ShyTwig16]

I mean if the game just stores the time and date of the start, and compares it to time and date at the end; this would me easily manipulated with just setting the time and date on the PC. So I'd think there'd just be a timer that constantly counts up, most games already have this just to list as a stat. So you'd just need to find the right timer and change how it's manipulated by the game, like a time scale multiplier. But finding the right timer would likely prove to be difficult and take some time. You might be able to have a save just before completing and try and reset it then complete the game to see if you have the right one. And since you can't reset the timer in game you'll just have to find timers that constantly count up and hope you get lucky, most games have hundreds of timers; timers for animation, sound, stats, key holds, etc. Just know this is something I'd expect to take days/weeks to find.

Another approach is an API hook and use the system tick count, but since you are asking this question it seems likely this is well beyond your current knowledge level. And if you've never done any thing like this it'd likely take weeks/months just to learn how. Hell it's beyond my current knowledge level, so I really have no idea how long it would take.