8085 Dissasembly?

[dwight]

Doing disassembly is about a process of refining. Some expect the disassembler to figure out where the gobs of data bytes are. Most such disassembler do a poor job on one or another program. The ones that actually work best are those that allow you ( a human ) to look at the result and allow you to see list of suspected pointers. Also, those that high light sections of code that don't make much sense. These features allow one to feedback to the assembler meaning full labels for what the code does.

Although, one might think this type of disassembler is more complicated, it is often the simpler ones that are the easiest to use.

I recommend that you write your own disassembler. The 8085 has a simple code. Make it so you can post process notes made into the early listings and have them copied to the new listing. It need to be able to start and stop disassembling and putting in fields of data bytes. It is always useful to be able to define these data bytes in some regular format, such as ASCII strings, address tables or possible offsets. The ability to carry forward such information makes the process of dissecting a program so much easier.

If it is a disassembler that you wrote, you can add features that may be specific to the code you are disassembling. An example of this is one I recently wrote to understand Forth code. I'm looking at a Forth written for the 6502 but turnkeyed for a specific purpose that is no longer useful. It had its complete dictionary intact that I'm making a new boot section to allow me to access the interpreter and compiler.

One can optimize C code as well. It tends to have regular groups of instructions as well. You as a human with a brain can do better at understanding things than any program.

Dwight


________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2018 6:07:21 AM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: 8085 Dissasembly?



On 04/17/2018 08:04 AM, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote:
>      > From: Eric Smith
>
>      > But then, some of us might be masochists.
>
> I think pretty much by definition if you're into vintage computers, you have
> to be a masochist... :-)
>
>

Many of us think that the advent of the x86 architecture is what led to
masochism.

bill