[Coco] Linville's ramblings on assembly vs machine code

[Peter Cetinski]

> On Jul 10, 2017, at 2:20 AM, Dave Philipsen <dave at davebiz.com> wrote:
> 
> Ok, so the list seems rather quiet so I'll try to stir the pot a bit here.  

One area where understanding machine code is important is in reverse engineering.  In the TRS-XENIX project I recently have been working on patching the Xenix 3.2 install disks so they can be run on unmodified Model 16s.  To do this I was basically looking at hex codes in disk images and mapping them to assembly source to figure out where to make the patches.  Painstaking because one of the programs is spread across disk sectors which are non-sequential in the image file.  While I'd never want to actually program in machine code, understanding how assembly is converted into opcodes and addresses certainly helps in this case and also in optimization.