new disassembler vs IDA (was Re: 8085 Dissasembly?)

[Eric Smith]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 8:17 PM, Mark J. Blair via cctech <
cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Some of the future reverse engineering projects I have on my to-do list
> involve the CDP1802 processor, which IDA presently doesn't support. When I
> get to them I'll have to decide whether to use dismantler vs. learning how
> to add CDP1802 support to IDA. I'm leaning towards the latter, because IDA
> is so much fancier than dismantler is.


I'd vote for adding it to dismantler.

I had an IDA Pro license at one point, but I seem to have misplaced it, and
it is too old to get me any discount on a new release.  I imagine that IDA
has probably improved a lot since back then, but at the time it had a
pretty awful user interface.

If I had an actual business need to reverse-engineer something using a
processor that IDA supported, I'd certainly buy a new IDA license, but I
wouldn't personally invest any time in building add-ons for expensive
commercial software, when there are open source alternatives that may not
be as good, but are generally good enough.

For the 1802, I've used a really crude disassembler written in C. The 1802
instruction set isn't very complicated, so a disassembler for it isn't
either.  It's been so many years since I actually disassembled 1802 code
that I'm not sure I still have the disassembler around.