rg-dis is a companion to our recent rg-asm; the McCartney to its Lennon; the Sporty Spice to its, err, Ginger Spice. Whilst rg-asm puts things together, rg-dis pulls them apart.
The unique thing about rg-dis is its deep knowledge of Atari hardware. It understands the full memory map of the machine; all the hardware registers, system vectors and operating system variables. It has full understanding of all the GEMDOS, BIOS and XBIOS calls. It knows all about AES and VDI and their data structures.
With this knowledge, it can annotate all operating system calls; input arguments and outputs.
And as it also understands assembly language, it can track how registers are stored and loaded, and assign contextually aware names to functions, making the disassembly far more readable.
It can also detect strings; both raw strings and VT52 enhanced ones (which it annotates), and gives them meaningful labels too.
Based on the same library that powers rg-asm, it can also show you cycle timing for instructions.
rg-dis has convenience functionality that allows you to disassemble files directly from containers like ZIP files without unzipping them. It also understands common Atari disk image formats, and you can disassemble files directly from them.
Another useful disk based feature - it can disassemble bootsectors directly, or full raw disk images, or any range of tracks and sectors you specify. Very handy for working with raw disk images.
rg-dis is a single binary with no dependencies - just unzip and run.
This is the second in our range of tools for Atari developers. More to come.
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