ImHex - absolutely wonderful disassembler and data analyser for m68k

[mikro]

I wish this was my thing to announce. :-) There are people in favour of Ghidra or IDA Pro but every time I wanted to try any of those, I felt really uncomfortable, can't even say why exactly - they are powerful tools, no doubt. And then I found ImHex: https://imhex.werwolv.net

With just two clicks I was able to get this:

imhex.png

Wonderful, wonderful disassembler and hex editor, everything works with mouse selection, realtime offsets and conversions to all possible formats.

hexedit, Ghidra, Okteta, m68k-atari-mint-objdump ... bye-bye, never going to see you ever again. ;)

[ThorstenOtto]

Quite nice GUI, but i usually prefer to convert whole files to assembler source, then work on the text files.

Ghidra is nice when working on foreign programs. Although it has some quirks, its ability to convert the assembler code back to C is invaluable to get a quick understanding what the code does.

[Anima]

Nice. Interesting tool for sure as it shows entropy graphs as well. Thanks.

[tOri]

Thank you mikro for info!

Regards
tOri

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Nice, downloaded!

I was just reading about advances in OpenAI the other day and thought what if it can learn Atari programming? It could probably fix a lot of bugs, maybe every bug in every Atari program if it learned.

[dhedberg]

Oh, great discovery! Played around with it for a few minutes and it's a keeper for sure! Thanks!

[lp]

Got all excited to try it and then my old mac refused to start it. lol
URL noted, will give it a go in the near future after my machine is replaced.

[Anima]

Got all excited to try it and then my old mac refused to start it. lol
URL noted, will give it a go in the near future after my machine is replaced.

I've got no problems running the tool on my MBP (late 2013 model, Monterey). IDK if it counts as an old Mac, though.

[ThorstenOtto]

Had some problems too running it on linux. The executables require glibc 2.34, but i have only 2.33 installed. Recompiling from source doesn't work either, because that requires gcc 12. I find it a bit strange that compiling from source requires a gcc version which has only been released a few weeks ago.

[ijor]

I wish this was my thing to announce. There are people in favour of Ghidra or IDA Pro but every time I wanted to try any of those, I felt really uncomfortable, can't even say why exactly - they are powerful tools, no doubt. And then I found ImHex: https://imhex.werwolv.net

The big advantage of Ida Pro (may be Ghidra as well, not used it too much), is that it can automatically detect the compiler, and then identify and label library calls by their original name, and even decompile. Can ImHex do something like that? Of course, that works only for programs that used a well known compiler version, not for ST programs.

[Anima]

The big advantage of Ida Pro (may be Ghidra as well, not used it too much), is that it can automatically detect the compiler, and then identify and label library calls by their original name, and even decompile. Can ImHex do something like that? Of course, that works only for programs that used a well known compiler version, not for ST programs.

The feature "graphical node-based data processor to pre-process values before they're displayed" looks like the IDO PRO Control Flow Graph. Maybe this was a bit misleading!?

[ThorstenOtto]

Of course, that works only for programs that used a well known compiler version, not for ST programs.

You can use that feature also for ST programs compiled by gcc. For programs compiled by Pure-C it is more work, because of the register calling convention. I've already created once a function-id database that can identify most of the standard-library, and with a script you can then modify those library calls to use the expected registers. For functions used by the program, you have to do that manually however. But it's possible.

[ijor]

You can use that feature also for ST programs compiled by gcc. For programs compiled by Pure-C it is more work, because of the register calling convention.

Interesting. But honestly, how many times you would this feature? I would expect most ST programs compiled with gcc to be open source

[ThorstenOtto]

Sometimes the source code is lost And i sometimes use it to check the code gcc actually produces. In more complex routines, its useful to have a rough outline of the C-code, so you will see where you are when click in the dissassembly.

But all i wanted to say is that this is a feature of Ghidra that generally works for any code, no matter which compiler produced it.

[ijor]

But all i wanted to say is that this is a feature of Ghidra that generally works for any code, no matter which compiler produced it.

Right, but you need the specific compiler library database. And not just for the compiler "brand", but for the specific version. These come builtin for the PC, of course. May be nowadays also for Mac and some ARM platforms?

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Nice, downloaded!

I was just reading about advances in OpenAI the other day and thought what if it can learn Atari programming? It could probably fix a lot of bugs, maybe every bug in every Atari program if it learned.

Hmm, found a neat article on the web where just this sort of thing is being done, wow.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... r-programs

From the article:

Code: Select all

Bugs and the system

Nor are those who write code the only beneficiaries. Developers spend nearly as much time searching
for bugs in what they have written as they do writing it in the first place. A machine-learning model
being built by Brendan Dolan-Gavitt of New York University may speed up the debugging process.

Code: Select all

Machines, it turns out, are now able to write even longish sequences of functioning code.
As John Carmack, a noted American computer engineer, has tweeted, pondering this development
“does generate a slight shiver”. Unsurprisingly, a number of firms see an opportunity.

I think within a decade, some version of AI, for example, will be able to take say an Amiga game and convert it to Atari AGTools or such in a short time.

It is an interesting possibility. Maybe we will finally get some of those games that were never released on Atari .

[dml]

Have not tried this one, looks interesting.

And visually it looks like it is using ImGui? I guess that's where the 'Im' prefix comes in