Re: disassembly of Debug.exe?

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:03:37 -0700 (PDT), Terence
<spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Based on postings and responses to othes, I wondered about finally
fixing the problems that irked me about MS Debug.exe not including a
function to trace out code vs data and allow simple dumping of
assembly code. And this is an itch of some 20 odd years!. But now I
have more time (huh!).

So I set out to disassemble Dbug.exe to add a full listing ability.

What surprised me was that NONE of my fairly-useful disassemblers
(BUBBLE, DASM, DIS86, GRDB, IDA, SICETOOL) would succeed!

Bubble managed to give me a page by page list, but it was pretty much
the same as using debug itself; (the tedium!), the rest simply bombed
out! Yes, really!

All of these tools are extremely difficult to use anyway.
Usually there a two requirements when using a disasembler:-

a) step through code to find a problem and hence a solution.
b) disassemble everything to study principles, suitable insert points
for additional services,
change nature of functions, all usually to make a better tool.

What do the readers suggest in either category, (but especially "b")?

No disassembler is going to do that very well. (Unless you are on a
system where the code and data are totally seperate.)

It took me YEARS to disassemble a 64k program well enough to be able
to reassemble it and get a working result. (not full time, though)

I use Sourcer, and it takes many passes of analyzing the listing,
applying corrections, and rerunning.

The free version of IDA should work about as well, but I haven't used
it much.
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