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Comment by mhh__ | Hacker News Reader

In terms of simply poking around with memory cheatengine's UI is much more direct than (say) GDB or similar

Yeah, you could consider going to something like x64dbg for this case, but really for finding data in memory, CheatEngine is king.

It really says a lot that kids are so easily able to use/understand what is going on with Cheat Engine, despite how powerful it is.

Tells you that people with a goal to accomplish don't need to have their tools dumbed down for them, despite what modern UX trends would have you believe.

GDB is an absolute nightmare to use with Asm, it's almost like it was designed to discourage it. Look up the absolutely perplexing behaviour of the "disassemble" command[1] for one example --- the first time I encountered it, I exclaimed "WTF!?" out loud.

WinDbg, and DOS's DEBUG that came before it, feel far more natural with such (and the former can also debug at source-level.)

[1] "No function contains specified address." -- when there is absolutely no requirement for anything to resemble a function in order to be capable of being disassembled.

Hit a breakpoint? My fingers are already typing x/10i. LLDB does stupid things otherwise as well (I think it will automatically "move your cursor down"?) so this is just the command I always reach for.

Yeah by default gdb sucks a bit for assembly, fortunately it's easily scriptable so I have a file with a bunch of functions to make it behave a bit more reasonably.

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