MacCE vs PINCE

MacCE is a free, open-source memory scanner for macOS programs running through Windows translation layers. It documents both a graphical interface and a command-line interface, targeting environments including Wine, CrossOver, Whisky, Kegworks, PlayOnMac, Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, and custom Wine builds. Scans cover numeric values, comparisons, ranges, unknown initial values, and rescans for changed, unchanged, increased, or decreased values. AOB searches accept hexadecimal patterns with ?? wildcards, while string scans support UTF-8 and UTF-16LE. Pointer scans follow one to four levels, and module-backed addresses are shown with a module basename and offset. Values can be frozen or refreshed periodically through watching. The project is released under the MIT License. Its README lists authorized uses such as software ownership, offline single-player games, CTF practice, exam targets, and debugging a personal Wine application, while advising against online games or services with anti-cheat or terms-of-service restrictions. There are no GitHub releases; build instructions require macOS, Xcode command-line tools, and GLFW from Homebrew.

PINCE is a Linux GDB front end and reverse engineering tool focused on games, though its maker says it can also serve other reverse engineering work. It is free at free and licensed under GPLv3+. Its memory tools support scanning memory and pointers, inspecting and changing variables, and locking variables. Debugging features include stepping, breakpoints, watchpoints, tracking, tracing, stack traces, and signal handling. The built-in speedhack supports Linux native and WINE/Proton processes without LD_PRELOAD or other libraries. Runtime injection supports native.so files and WINE/Proton DLL files, and the Mono/IL2CPP dissector can browse classes, fields, and methods in those process types. Users can save address tables, bookmarks, notes, and structures in.pct session files. PINCE includes a scripting engine and reusable Python library. The project directs users to its latest AppImage release, stated to run on distributions as new as or newer than Ubuntu 22.04; older distributions are not officially supported. Official local development support includes Kubuntu 22.04+ and Arch Linux, with Debian 12+, Fedora 35+, and OpenSUSE partially supported.