Code: Learning Disassembly Assembly

[1project2many]

"Who is that masked man??"

There are only a few reasons to grab the disassembler. 1) You can't find an existing disassembly. 2) You want the experience. 3) You want to make a disassembly that can be reassembled later. Most people will never need get to the point where they're trying to reassemble code but you won't need to ask if you get there.

Adding items to an XDF is easy of course. Naming them correctly is tougher and getting a correct description of what they do takes even more time. Often you'll need to be able to step through the lines of code to see just what a value is for. An "upper closed loop tps limit" could be used several different ways and without reading the code you're not going to know which is correct. Sounds like you've run into this already.

Jim's talking about trying to reassemble code from a disassembly. The ASM file is what's used as a template for the assembler. Addressing modes refer to how the processor gets data from memory. If you don't get the right mode the processor looks in the wrong place.

I'm not sure why no one recommends the TC disassembler. I don't because I think there are more powerful tools. I like the old Dewtronics tool that I've posted here (code seeking disassembler). It's easy to use and was employed by a well know player on the market for a while. IDA Pro is good in a different way. It can format code, mark jumps and branches for easy tracing later, and does a decent job with labels. It's also expensive.

Jim, thanks. We've had a lot of newbies here in the shop and because I work for a company that handles special needs children I frequently have a "work study" kid here as well. If I can't teach them what needs to be done, I end up doing twice as much work myself. So I use my experiences with good teachers from my past in order to do what I do. Plus, there's the magic of proofreading and editing here. ;)

What are you using for an assembler? Does it have operands to force addressing modes? Will it adhere to your commands?