[Simh] Fw: Reverse engineering and retrocomputing

[Johnny Billquist]

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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-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol