From: gnu (John Gilmore)
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 93 00:35:23 PDT
To: J. Michael Diehl <mdiehl@triton.unm.edu>
Subject: Re: decompiling DISKREET
In-Reply-To: <9306050121.AA13122@triton.unm.edu>
Message-ID: <9306060734.AA00306@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> > This is the reason that I disregard DISKREET from Norton.  There's no
> > source, and largish companies are notorious for pushing compromised
> > software.  Norton's unlikely to ship source, so unless someone
> > decompiles it, I'm not biting.
> 
> HMMmmm.....  Well, how big is it?  Is it a .exe or .com?  It might be very 
> instructive to see how they do it...

By the way, I have a relatively usable free 68k disassembler, and have
recently retrofitted the simple GNU portable disassembler (supporting
many processors) with an interface that should allow it to be glued
into the usable disassembler (which traces branches, creates labels,
lets you label things yourself, etc).  Anyone who would like to work
on these tools, please let me know.

The GNU `objdump' program will disassemble the entire program from any
object file format it recognizes (currently most a.out variants, most
COFF variants, ELF, ecoff, xcoff, s-records, some IEEE object files).
We have specs on the Windows object file formats, if anyone wants to 
add support for reading them.  DOS EXE and COM files would be a useful
addition, as well.

You can get a taste of the current simple disassembler by getting the
latest GNU Binutils (binary utilities) release from prep.ai.mit.edu or
ftp.uu.net.  Configure and build it on any of about twelve kinds of
Unix machines, and run "objdump -d" on itself.

	John Gilmore