Hacker News Reader

Comment by heisenburgzero | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered where to start learning reverse-engineering. Most people will say learn Assembly first. But from there on, there seems to be not much more concrete information online.

Do people just figured it out by trial & error like common patterns in x86 / arm / arcade platforms slowly?

I can't really find much discussion on details online.

View on HN

It's like debugging.. I'm sure you must have worked on an unfamiliar code base at some point and had to figure it out. Instead of having the source you have the binary and using tools like Ghidra you can start to piece together the source but you'll still need to reason over it the very same way you did on that unfamiliar codebase and this time there's no comments at all ( which isn't uncommon in a lot of source available projects mind you )

So you're probably already half way there. Being familiar with assembly code helps of course.

run through http://microcorruption.com or https://crackmes.one/ for closer to real-life examples

I personally learned a lot by messing in Cheat Engine, it is way more capable than I thought, specially because I mostly used it as a kid and never looked back.

It is a great tool to get started with assembly in my opinion because the disassembler is good enough and you can write what they call 'assembly scripts' which provides the foundation on doing memory patches in x86 asm. Then from that you can start writing your own utils to patch the games at your own will.

You can do crazy cheats by patching the game just with Cheat Engine!

I knew some from school, but stepping through a debugger with a video game that I remembered from childhood was a better education on computer engineering than anything I got in class.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com