A 6502 disassembler with a TUI: A modern take on Regenerator | Hacker News Reader

A 6502 disassembler with a TUI: A modern take on Regenerator

github.com

92 pointswslh11 comments

Looks super cool...

I built a similar thing, primarily for my own fun. As a reaction to various C64 tools being scattered/old/unsupported exes and often with not OSX builds, my approach was to build a low-friction web app, which I could mess around with easily across whatever machine I was sitting in front of, whenever I had a few moments (kids...)

https://46c.io/

Examples : https://46c.io/project/NVXAZ7JY/code/ram/0E2B https://46c.io/project/8VM2EY7T/library

Basically : select a byte (or a range with shift) and use the buttons at the top to tag it with some metadata like a label, a comment, mark it as the lo/hi byte of a pointer etc - and it'll update the disassembly immediately. It saves all your work in browser local storage by default but if you sign in you can work from 'the cloud' (cheapo Firebase account) - I haven't shared widely before so no idea how that will hold up to the HN effect...

Enjoy!

Loved the examples!

Fantastic work. I especially like the Code view, but when combined all together it looks amazing. The minimal settings seem just the right size and look as well.

I need this web page somehow linked up to me in 1984-88.

Nice to see an MCP integration here as well. In my experience, coding agents are great at analyzing MOS6502 code. Because the code is limited to only 64 kB, it does not overwhelm the agent. And in parallel it can write specs and even extract assets via normal coding tools.

Using my similar tool [0], I feel I get roughly a 100x speedup. I will definitely try regenerator2000.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/OpcodeOracle

Ricardo Quesada is also one of the creators of cocos2d, he's been around for a while!

Check https://retro.moe/ !

Wish I had something like that when I was coding demos around 1988... :-)

(Edit): you kids have it easy.

I grew up in the 80's programming my C64, assuming that this would be more or less the sort of thing I'd be doing for a living. The reality is actually pretty disappointing. I _wish_ anybody still did this stuff.

I wrote something similar in the 1990s. Except, I had to write the TUI library myself (in x86 assembler) since nothing like what I needed existed at the time.

I was working on a project to do ECU performance curve remapping for a rally driver friend, so mine had additional features like the ability to export memory segments as .m files for plotting curves in Matlab.

I watched a video about ECU remapping (on a modern processor) yesterday, and the guy started by using the OBD port to get access to the system. I had to physically desolder the EPROM from the board to dump it back in the day.

The kids today have it far too easy.

One thing I’ve always found tricky when reversing C64 code is self-modifying code, pretty much every game and demo uses STA to patch operands at runtime. Does the auto-analysis flag writes into code regions, or is that something you’d handle manually with the VICE debugger integration?

Nice. Please add support for NES.

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