M6811DIS Disassembler

[Donald Whisnant]

> 
> Date: Fri, 09 Jul 1999 10:00:25 -0400
> From: jsg at donet.com
> Subject: Re: M6811DIS Disassembler 
> 
> Thanks Donald
> 
> Two thumbs up for this code. I ran it in dosem on linux without any
> problems. I was preparing to write a front end to the gnu tools to do
> something similar, but this is more advanced and in place. The
> immediate addressing mode to table locations is the only area that I
> see as a problem; however, that can easily be worked around once the
> addresses/labels are identified.
> 
> with large segments of common code in different ecm's, I'm thinking about a
> auto-commenting package that could correlate code segments and copy
> comments from a commented source code to one that is not. It may only
> be appropriate for 80% of the code, but I think it would be easier to
> fix 20% than to start from scratch. any thoughts?
> 
> john gwynne
> 

John...

Thanks for the feedback...  So this confirms that it runs under
dosemu...  I had heard that it did, but hadn't gotten around to trying
it on my machine here...

As for your other idea, I'm already one step ahead of you...  That is
one of the things I have planned for GenREP...  What I have in mind is
during the disassembly to have the disassembler localize functions,
which it can do by looking at branches and returns...  Once it has
identified specific functions, it can setup a signature for that
function...  For that file, you continue to disassemble and comment as
usual...  Then later, when working on another (similar but different)
file, again functions will be localized and signed...  Then, GenREP will
do a fuzzy comparison with the signatures and for those with a high
percent of correlation, it can copy over comment information by matching
up opcodes...  Since the signatures will treat the addresses as
relative, it won't matter if the matched code is relocated or not...

I have done some testing with this with some success, but haven't
totally decided what I want the signatures to look like or to work out
all of the details...

I'm also planning to have it keep a separate comments file.  This way,
when you re-run the disassembler it doesn't wipe out the comments... 
This is planned for the GUI version and possibly some scripts to do it
at the command-line level...

Thanks again for the feedback...
Donald Whisnant
dewhisna at ix.netcom.com