On Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:09:22 +0100 (CET)
Christian Corti via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Sometimes I use Ghidra, but it is a holy complex thing
and has some
very nasty habits like C-style hex constants etc.
I was wondering if Ghidra would get a mention ;-)
I haven't used it and I might be tempted, if I was tackling a project
that had been written in something 'higher' than assembly language.
However, this is clearly hand written and I have a good amount of
information already about the structures they would pick for the
project.
I had hoped that Binary Ninja would be a powerful and
nice tool,
although commercial, but I have bought a personal license to try it.
But this is the biggest crap that I have ever seen! This is not what
I call a disassembler. It is a graphical whatever thing, and it can't
even just show you a disassembly in a normal fashion. Everything is
transformed into pseudo high-level garbage and so on. So for now I
can only recommend to stay away from it for real disassembly.
I did try this:
https://github.com/msrst/interactive-8051-disassembler
which looked interesting from the screenshots but was quickly
frustrating. I don't know whether I just work differently, but I needed
to separate out code from data and then attach names to the data first,
starting with the I/O from the 8051 itself, UART, NVRAM, keyboard, etc.
The possible names of functions were only going to become apparent
after that was done, other than naming lots of tiny helper functions
around the place.
Regards,
Paul