system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How did "cheat" cartridges like Game Genie work and find cheats and hidden options in games?
gpt
Such cheat cartridges modified parameters in memory. The modern equivalent of this would be like Cheatengine for PC.

As an example, let's say you're playing a beat 'em up and want infinite lives. While you're playing the game, the game needs to know how many lives you currently have. This is stored in memory (in hexidicimal, which is base 16 - essentially 0-9, and A-F as digits instead of just 0-9). 00 would be zero lives, 02 as 2 lives, 0A as 11 lives, etc etc etc. The game genie modifies the value to be for example, FF - 255 lives.