Writing a Disassembler

[Glorioso]

Hey,
I'm newish to the forum( never posted before ) but anyway. I'm thinking of writing a disassembler for z80 or a similar architecture in ally C and was wondering if anyone can give me some tips or places to get started, I've never actually wrote a disassembler before either so.(I use slackware linux by the way). Also I know there are tons of disassemblers for that architecture I'd just like to be able to write them myself.

Thanks in advance,
Glorioso

[Glorioso]

Sorry I mean in C not ally C (typo), I would edit it but for some reason it won't let me.

[Ancient Dragon]

I was wondering what "ally C" is? anything like an "ally cat" ?:)

BTW: I have no idea about how to write a disassembler -- although I know an executable can not be disassembled back to C or C++ code. About the best you can accomplish is to generate the assembly language.

[Glorioso]

I was wondering what "ally C" is? anything like an "ally cat" ?:)

BTW: I have no idea about how to write a disassembler -- although I know an executable can not be disassembled back to C or C++ code. About the best you can accomplish is to generate the assembly language.

Yeah that's what I want to do, make a program to disassemble to the assembly code, sorry I should have made myself more clear.

[Ancient Dragon]

first you will have to learn assembly language of the machine that the code is running on. If you know that, then it should not be difficult to write the disassembler. I don't know about *nix, but MS-Windows every executable program starts with a header structure (Microsoft Portable Executable and Common Object File Format Specification) and that structure has changed slightly from one version of MS-Windows to another. Here would be the first place to start your research.