[Simh] Fw: Reverse engineering and retrocomputing

[Seth Morabito]

On Sat, Aug 3, 2019, at 11:43 AM, Richard Cornwell wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>   I have to agree here, what exactly does this tool do?
> 
>   Writing a disassembler is not that hard. I have written several over
>   the years, one tried to decompile Fortran II for the I7090. Many will
>   do detection of code verse data and auto generation of labels. I then
>   use the output of these to generate some source file and assemble it
>   and use the tool on output and continue comparing until the assembled
>   binary matches the original binary.
> 
> Rich


Ghidra is an extensible reverse engineering, disassembly, and decompilation framework. It is (unfortunately, IMHO) written in Java, which I suppose is good for me because I have (again, unfortunately) lots and lots and lots of professional experience with Java. I've already hacked on Ghidra a bit for my own projects, adding support for AT&T's odd 80186 COFF format.

The tool is essentially an IDE for binaries. It knows all about most common library, object, and executable formats, and will disassemble and produce a very convenient graph of functions and calls, let you annotate and decompile bits of the assembly, and so on. I've only explored the top layer because I didn't need a tremendous number of advanced features for the project I was working on with it.

It supports 16, 32, and 64 bit x86, ARM, Atmel, 6502, 68000,  Z80, PowerPC, PA-RISC, SPARC, MIPS and a few others I think I'm forgetting.

I think that's the main advantage: It's a Swiss Army knife for instruction sets and binary formats.

-Seth
-- 
  Seth Morabito
  Poulsbo, WA
  web at loomcom.com