Comment by scotty79
It's not that bad if you don't expect too much of yourself. I could patch some software machine code just by drawing on my 6502 teenage experience from more than 20 years ago. x86 or IL ASM doesn't matter all that much. Core concepts are the same. Registers, stack, relative jumps conditioned on the contents of flag register.
One thing that tripped me up a bit is that on x86 standard practice is using "taking address" lea operation combined with weird addressing mode to do simple arithmetics. I had to ask ChatGPT wtf is that.
In the process I learned that 686 assembly is a very different beast and they don't play nicely with each other (or at all).
Ah, interesting. I think, looking back, that "lea" is usually where I start getting confused!
I apparently also need to internalize harder that I should just ask llms about everything :-)