Christopher G. Phillips (University of Texas at Austin) submits his "m68kdis" disassembler for the Motorola 68000 family of CPU chips. Disassemblers are system software that accepts a binary executable as input and produces assembly language source as output. Specifically, m68kdis supports the full instruction sets of the 68000, 68008, 68010, 68020, and 68030 CPU chips. Additionally, m68kdis decodes instructions for the 68851 Paged Memory Unit and the 68881/68882 Floating-Point Coprocessors. The Motorola 68000 family chips power millions of computers including the Macintosh, Atari, Amiga, and many embedded CPU industrial applications. The CUG Library edition of m68kdis includes full source in C (no executables are provided). The m68kdis disassembler is immediately available as CUG volume #441.
Since m68kdis is portable, it is actually a cross-disassembler. For example, you can disassemble 68000 programs on a variety of host CPUs from PCs to Unix machines. Phillips provides a very clean Makefile without any OS specific flags or options. Additionally, he takes care to avoid common pitfalls such as dependencies on the size of the int data type.
In its basic operation, m68kdis reads in a single binary file (.o) and produces an ASCII file containing an assembly language output (.s). Ideally, the ".s" file could be run through your assembler and would produce an ".o" file identical to the original. Strictly speaking, a disassembler is just a subset of functionality found in a debugger. The output of m68kdisk is divided into five distinct columns: program counter, file contents, label, instruction, and operands (see Fig. 1).
Programmers often use disassemblers in two specific modes of operation. First, a disassembler may be used as a one-time operation to check the operation of a compiler, the validity of an executable, the executable startup code, or similar examination. Second, the programmer may use a sophisticated disassembler such as m68kdis in several successive iterations. In this cycle, the programmer uses his own judgement to help separate blocks of instructions from blocks of data. Then he applies his knowledge or guesswork so that the next iteration provides clearer output. With persistence, a usable source file can result.
m68kdis supports this iterative method of use by providing options (see Fig. 2) for the import of separate files containing external knowledge of the input file. For example, the "-i file" option accepts an input ASCII file containing unsigned long integers that represent addresses at which instructions are known to start. Similarly, you can create files of addresses where data is known to reside. A small improvement to m68kdis would allow ranges of addresses instead of just singleton addresses in the file.
Although m68kdis works equally well against any target 68000 executable, the author includes special additional support for Macintosh executables. m68kdis understands enough of the executable to follow the resource fork and dump it in a readable fashion. This insures more reliable output because determining the difference between instructions and data is the prime job of a disassembler.
m68kdis supplies files containing Macintosh A-line instructions and their OS equivalent entry point names. More than 800 A-line instructions can be decoded in this manner. These entry points are somewhat analogous to BIOS interrupt (INT) instructions used on Intel-based MS-DOS PCs.
There is also a series of PERL scripts that perform post-processing on the output of the disassembler. PERL is not included in the CUG Library distribution, but is widely available on the Internet.
Documentation for m68kdis consists primarily of a 5-page summary that appears in Unix "man" page format. As such, it primarily details command line options and usage. For insights into disassembly algorithms, you'll need to follow the comments in the code. For details on the 68000 family instructions sets, please see the section named "Further Reading" below.
Phillips includes an extremely generous license that extends the permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee. The only restriction is that his supplied copyright notice appear must in all copies of software and that both the copyright notice and the permission notice appear in supporting documentation.
Since m68kdis is freeware, there are no formal support options available. Support is thus neccessarily limited to email correspondence regarding bugs and enhancement requests.
For those interested in how 68000 family instructions are encoded, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ) publishes a complete line of databooks. Here are some of the titles that Phillips cites:
Motorola. M68000 8/16/32 Bit Microprocessors: Programmer's Reference Manual, 5th ed. Motorola. M68030: Enhanced 32-Bit Microprocessor User's Manual, 2nd ed Motorola. M68851: Paged Memory Management Unit User's Manual, 2nd ed. Motorola. M68881/MC68882: Floating-Point Coprocessor User's Manual, 2nd ed. ------------ Sample Output of m68kdis options (FIG. 2) ----------PC File Contents Label Instruction + Operands ========= ========================== ====== ====================== 00000000 206f0004 MOVEA.L (4,SP),A0 00000004 43fa0030 LEA L5,A1 00000008 322f0008 MOVE.W (8,SP),D1 0000000c 7000 MOVEQ #0,D0 0000000e 600a BRA L2 00000010 b308 L1 CMPM.B (A0)+,(A1)+ 00000012 6620 BNE L4 00000014 4a28ffff TST.B (-1,A0) 00000018 6604 BNE L3 0000001a 51c9fff4 L2 DBRA D1,L1 0000001e f23a4800001c L3 FMOVE.X L6,FP0 00000024 f2000004 FSQRT.X FP0 00000028 f22f5438000a FCMP.D (10,SP),FP0 0000002e f29c0004 FBNGE L4 00000032 7001 MOVEQ #1,D0 00000034 4e75 L4 RTS 00000036 6d36386b646973 L5 DC.B 'm68kdis' 0000003d 00 DC.B #0 0000003e 40000000c90fdaa22168c000 L6 DC.X #3.14159265358979
OPTION WHAT IT DOES -ddd Specify the chip and coprocessors (e.g. 020) -a file Load file containing A-line opcodes -all[c] Force single pass operation -b file Load file of data addresses to force newlines -bad Echo invalid instructions to stderr -f file Load file containing F-line opcodes -f# # Floating-point constant mantissa -i file Load file of known instruction addresses -j file Load file of A-line and F-Line jumps -l Force output to lower case -lft Affects fall-through instructions to LINK -n file Load file of known data addresses -ns file Load file of known addresses not starting instrs. -o file Names output file -odd Allow instructions to start on odd offset -pc # Set program counter to this value on start -s # Minimum length to consider data as string -slenp # Maximum length of a string on output line -sp Output A7 as SP except in MOVEM instructions
CUG # Title ------ --------------- CUG190 Steve Passe's 68K Assembler CUG204 68000 C Compiler CUG261 68K Cross Assembler, MSDOS CUG303 MC68K Disassembler* CUG338 68000 C Compiler and Assembler (2 disks) CUG363 68020 Cross Assembler (2 disks)
* The CUG303 MC68K Disassembler is considerably less advanced than M68KDIS. For example, it does not include instruction-level support for 68010, 68020, 68851, or 68881/68882 chips. Also MC68K omits Macintosh support and the ability to declare regions of the file as data or code.