Agreed about ease.<p>The first time I reversed anything was when I was playing a shareware game on my mom&#x27;s Quadra 650 running Mac OS 7.6.1. I was maybe 12 or 13. I had reached the end of the game&#x27;s limited demo, and it asked me to enter a code.<p>I discovered that a program called &quot;Super ResEdit&quot; would open up the game and show me its internal resources. Icons, text, menubars... and also a long column of lines that looked something like &quot;ADD R1, R2, R3&quot; and &quot;CMP R2, R3&quot; and &quot;BNE +0x8&quot;.<p>Anything of the form &quot;B ...&quot; or &quot;BEQ ...&quot; or &quot;BNE ...&quot;, when I moved the cursor over it, would develop an arrow pointing to a different line. Aha! &quot;B&quot; stands for &quot;Branch&quot;. In that case, &quot;BEQ&quot; stands for &quot;Branch if equal&quot;, &quot;BNE&quot; stands for &quot;Branch if Not Equal&quot;. It must be that &quot;CMP&quot;, which usually preceded one of these lines, stood for &quot;Compare&quot;...<p>After that it was a matter of finding a section called &quot;do_registration_check&quot;, seeing a bunch of arithmetic (&quot;ADD&quot;, &quot;MULT&quot;), then a &quot;CMP&quot; followed by &quot;BNE&quot;. Apparently if I entered an incorrect code, the &quot;Branch Not Equal&quot; path would be followed. I didn&#x27;t know about NOPs at the time, since the compiled code didn&#x27;t have any, but I <i>could</i> change a &quot;BNE&quot; to a &quot;BEQ&quot;.<p>Super big rush! Discovering, on my own, how to take something apart and bend it to my will.