this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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retrocomputing

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I dumped the ROM out of a piece of retro-tech and have been working through the code in Ghidra. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly decompile it because I don’t think it was originally written in a higher level language.

For example, the stack is rarely used and most functions either deal entirely in global variables, or binary values are passed back using the carry or other low-level bits. Trying to turn it into C would just make spaghetti code with a different sauce.

So my current plan is to just comment every subroutine as best I can, but that still leaves a few massive lookup tables that should be dropped into a spreadsheet of some sort to add context. Not to mention schematics.

My question is what’s the best way to present all of this? I’d like to open-source the result, so a simple PDF is not ideal. I guess I should make a GitHub project? Are there any good examples or templates I can draw on?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yikes!

Yeah, I don't think I can help too much with that, unfortunately. I hear there was quite an art to annotating hand-written assembly (to the point where you're basically play-acting an interpreter or compiler), but I wasn't there to learn.