What exactly does that tool do, then?
I mean, I already have several disassemblers, which I can throw PDP-11
code at, and which gives me assembler output, that I can then continue
working on.
It was actually not so uncommon that you needed to do this back in the
day, which is why several such tools exists inside the PDP-11 world.
Johnny
On 2019-07-31 04:52, Galen wrote:
I’m curious to hear how many in the simh community have significant
interest, or most especially experience, in reverse engineering binary
code. Although there’s no reason to limit the discussion to simh-ers,
this is the retrocomputing community I know the best, so I thought I’d
ask here first.)
Since there is so much historic software to which the sources are no
longer available, reverse engineering appears to me to have a lot
applicability here.
Perhaps you’ve heard already of Ghidra, the software reverse engineering
framework that NSA open-sourced earlier this year?
I do not and have never worked for NSA, but I have some experience of
how Ghidra models instruction set architectures. I’ve even used it with
a retro architecture myself, the Z80, and managed to help solve some
small problems with how Ghidra modeled a few specific instructions.
I have a real soft spot, though, for the PDP-11, which NSA’s
otherwise-wonderful tool doesn’t support. Way back when, in college and
the first 10 years or so of my career, I worked a great deal with PDP-11
assembly language as well as knowing enough about the hardware
architecture and RSX-11 internals to do some simple drivers and other
low-level software.
I’d love an opportunity to help bring support for the PDP-11 to Ghidra
but I don’t have time right now to kick off such a project. I could
certainly help out significantly, though.
How to model an instruction set architecture in Ghidra isn’t something
you can learn from the Ghidra docs, let alone from any other publicly
available tutorial material. But Ghidra does include sources for its
models of the ISAs that NSA has released support for. Through experience
with several of those over the last few years I’ve picked up enough
knowledge to help explain some of what you’d find in those models.
What’s the interest here?
Galen
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|| on a psychedelic trip
email: [email protected] || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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