I started to make an effort to make an assembler... and I am looking at these intel manuals and well its not straight forwards... sooo I am starting by taking a brute force approach... I am using fasm to assemble simple instructions I want to encode... I get the binary opcodes from the assembled file and thats what I'm using... I'm gonna store them in a big array of opcodes..

I know thats the dumb way of doing it... I am hoping to see a pattern that would help me read the intel manuals for the more complicated instructions... and I am posting here to check if anybody here can point me on a better direction...

Never mind sort off, I found this reference site which explains it much easier...
http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~lockwood/class/cse306-s04/resources/opcodes.html

Cool link. Let us know how it turns out for you!