[A86] Re: TI-86 Disassembler

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[A86] Re: TI-86 Disassembler


rabidcow@juno.com writes:
> I remember hearing about that, and I really wish it wish it was in
> there...

That reminded me that I probably sent it to Jonah.  Fortunately, I'm a pack
rat and have all my email since 1999 (until Outlook Express eats itself), so
I did a search and found it.  Unfortunately, there's no source and quite
likely never will be.  If it's that important, grab the original source and
do it again, I think it only took an hour or so :)

I put it up here (good ol' Debian box with ftpfs running Samba lets me drag
files directly from Win2k to my hosting server):

http://david.acz.org/vti-sym.zip

> eh... ok, yes.
> For that matter you could just create a source file that was a single
> .incbin line, but that would be pretty useless.  I suppose what I'm
> trying to say is that it wouldn't be suitable to run through a *human*
> trying to figure out what it does, modify it, then reassemble it.

I figured that's what you were thinking, but it's clearly not what you said
:)

> There's no point in using a disassembler if your goal is *only* to
> run it through an assembler again, you usually want something somewhat
> meaningful for source code.  So technically, you could just produce
> whatever would come back out of an assembler unchanged, but
> realistically that's useless.

Yep.  I was thinking you could have an emulator like VTI mark which bytes it
has executed and which bytes code has looked up, in an attempt to help the
dissassembler.  There's likely a lot of tricks that can be used, many that
are the same as a dynamic recompiler (since it has to detect self modifying
code and all that fun stuff).

What seems strange is that there are NO books on emulators available.  None.
At least if they are, I haven't seen them and don't know where to get them.
Search on Amazon.com for "emulators" and get three out of print books for
terminal emulators for mainframes.  Nothing in local book shops either
(though they rarely have things that Amazon doesn't).  There have been a lot
of really amazing techniques for emulators developed in the recent years and
few few if any are formally documented.  I tried to hint to Rusty a while
ago that he should write a book on emulators (VTI is cake compared to the
others he has done).  Oh well, maybe someday.

--
David Phillips <david@acz.org>
http://david.acz.org/
References: