Saturday, September 28, 2013

8080 Disassembler

I've ordered an Altair 8800 replica computer from Briel Computers. While I'm waiting for it to arrive, I've been reading up on the 8080 microprocessor, the Altair 8800, and CP/M operating system.

For fun I wrote an 8080 assembly language disassembler to help understand 8080 machine language and in preparation for playing with some 8080 assembler programs. I also used it as an opportunity to get more familiar with the Python programming language. It's the first significant program I've written in Python and it was relatively painless to code.

You can get the source code here. The program reads a binary file specified on the command line and produces a disassembly. It requires Python 3. It has been tested on Linux but should work on any platform that supports Python. See the source code for more details.

Here is some sample output using the first example program in the Altair 8800 manual:

% ./disasm8080.py ex2.bin 
0000            org     $0000
0000  3A 80 00  lda     $0080
0003  47        mov     b,a
0004  3A 81 00  lda     $0081
0007  80        add     b
0008  32 82 00  sta     $0082
000B  C3 00 00  jmp     $0000
000E            end

I implemented a number of options to control the output format such as the start address and whether to show the hex bytes or just instructions.

I'd say about one third of the effort was coding, one third was entering the table of 8080 instructions, and one third was learning how to do various things in Python, like reading a binary file and manipulating strings.

If is free software released under the Apache License. Give it a try if you are interested.