This is really cool - how did you develop the background knowledge to solve this? I'm trying to learn more about low-level stuff and I would have no idea how to approach solving a problem like this

I'd recommend searching HN for threads about learning reverse engineering. Here are a few that I've found:

Reverse Engineering Course: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=22061842

Reverse Engineering For Beginners: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=21640669

Introduction to reverse engineering for beginners: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=16104958

I love it but I don’t have the focus or patience to ever do anything more than basic analysis.

A lot of the reverse engineers I know seemingly have deep platform knowledge and can do things like cite Win32 docs from memory.

I was a reverse engineer for years and never was able to do anything like quoting docs. I'd be constantly googling or using reference material. The only real attribute I'd suggest is tenacity.

Tenacity is everything.

Both when looking at a particular problem, but also in sticking to RE in general for long enough to pick up the skills and tricks that make you quick. There are countless tricks you pick up that cleave off huge amounts of time that would otherwise be wasted.

The number one way to get the patience to do this is to have impatience for software that is slow.

And with most RE software(especially the mentioned inaccessible interactive disassembling tool) you'll get that by default, waiting for a 70mb binary to analyze isn't fun :)

Fortunately, software engineers can be bad at making time value judgments ;)

Here's a good book on software reverse engineering (SRE): https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Reverse-Engineering-Reversi...

It won't help you with PowerPC, but the chapter list is: x86 and x64, ARM, The Windows Kernel, Debugging and Automation, and Obfuscation.

The book was written in 2014, so it should be reasonably relevant for modern purposes, and especially so if digging into any software older than 2014.