Star Craft


You know, that attitude really annoys me. If you don't encourage people, they probably won't even try. You have no idea whether they are capable or not - they might not be at this very minute, but you have no idea what aptitude they have for that sort of thing.
But he was actually right here. You don't improvise yourself an ASM programer overnight - and you can't seriously tell people to follow a link on x86 or ARM assembler to figure it out by themselves. Especially if they have no prior programming experience. 

If you want to help people, start telling them to have realistic goals, and show them what they can start doing, and progressively build on that to become more advanced and skilled. If you throw someone to try assembly from scratch, what you end up with is someone who won't grasp anything and who will give up after 5 minutes, That's the attitude which is wrong.
 
Except for physical limitations. Not everybody can get lung capacity or muscle-weight ratios that put them at the top of their game like some Olympic athletes. Of course, you can get a long way with sheer hard work, and there's no shame in coming, say 40th in the Tour De France. It's more of an achievement than most of us will make.
Learn about this man story : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Lavoie
He have been told all his youth that he worth nothing at sport (being a little fat) yet years later he won the Hawaï ironman, broke a world record at it...
Yeah but this guy has trained for x years and how many hours a day to reach that level ? As I mentioned above, you need to start step by step to reach this kind of level. 
 
But he was actually right here.
No he's not. All Klasp said that if you asked "How could I win (x) cycling tournament?" and got the reply "Buy a bike", sure, it's not the whole story, but it's where you start. That provides absolutely zero indication whether the person with their new bike would be any good or not.
You don't improvise yourself an ASM programer overnight - and you can't seriously tell people to follow a link on x86 or ARM assembler to figure it out by themselves. Especially if they have no prior programming experience. 

If you want to help people, start telling them to have realistic goals, and show them what they can start doing, and progressively build on that to become more advanced and skilled. If you throw someone to try assembly from scratch, what you end up with is someone who won't grasp anything and who will give up after 5 minutes, That's the attitude which is wrong.
Are these comments supposed to be directed at me? I don't ever remembering to tell them to figure ASM out by themselves, or try and convert Diablo 2 as their first project? I don't remember anyone else doing the same either.
Sure, you've got to take baby steps, but you also have to tell people where to start. They are allowed to ask for more information if they want to. If they get bored, then, well, they know it's not for them, and move on.
 
Except for physical limitations. Not everybody can get lung capacity or muscle-weight ratios that put them at the top of their game like some Olympic athletes. Of course, you can get a long way with sheer hard work, and there's no shame in coming, say 40th in the Tour De France. It's more of an achievement than most of us will make.

Likewise, mental capacity and aptitude. You can get a long way with hard work, concentration and sheer-bloody mindedness, but not everybody will become an amazing software hacker like some of the chaps contributing to the Pandora scene. Again, no harm in trying, though!
Porting software via disassembly isn't a race, and you don't need to be "the best". You only need to have an understanding, just like everybody learns at least one language. If I gave you a book in Swedish, or German, or some other non-native language to you, you would be able to translate it - it wouldn't be done in a day, but with a translation dictionary, you would work through each word, and convert them, then you'd go back over each sentence and fix the grammar.
 
The first step is rather easy: just load up the binary executable into the disassembler.

After that one ends up either with the disassembled code or it fails miserably and you get nothing much.

If it succeeds then one will be faced with loads of assembler code.

At that point it will be easy to see the magnitude of the challenge and make a decision to continue or not.

All of the above takes like 5-10 mins.
 
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