Online 6502 disassembler
I’ve already visited the wonderful MOS 6502 architecture in a post titled Fantasy console on a console where I ported my 6502 emulator to the Gameboy Advance.
Keeping in the spirit of implementing web applications in C, I’ve extracted and refactored a disassembler out of the emu6502 emulator. It’s usable in the box below:
6502 Disassembler
Making of this tool
The 6502 instruction set is quite simplistic, compared to RISC-V. Decoding of the instructions is very straightforward, basically working our way through a table of instructions and their arguments. The first step is to compile a list of opcodes (instructions with the various addressing modes) into one header:
#define NOP 0xea
#define LDA_IMM 0xa9
#define LDA_ZP 0xa5
#define LDA_ABS 0xad
#define LDA_ABSX 0xbd
#define LDA_INDX 0xa1
That is accompanied by a giant switch statement where we map the opcodes to the output
uint8_t* code = (uint8_t*)&buffer[pc];
uint8_t bytes = 1;
char op[32] = "";
switch (*code) {
case NOP: sprintf(op, "NOP"); break;
case LDA_IMM: sprintf(op, "LDA #$%02X", code[1]); bytes = 2; break;
case LDA_ZP: sprintf(op, "LDA $%02X", code[1]); bytes = 2; break;
case LDA_ABS: sprintf(op, "LDA $%02X%02X", code[2], code[1]); bytes = 3; break;
case LDA_ABSX: sprintf(op, "LDA $%02X%02X,X", code[2], code[1]); bytes = 3; break;
case LDA_INDX: sprintf(op, "LDA ($%02X,X)", code[1]); bytes = 2; break;
...
Because of the variable-length instructions, we need to keep a track of how many bytes the disassembler consumed.
Then we do another hop to print out the value of the opcode arguments, and we end up with code listing as follows:
0: A5 FE LDA $FE
2: 85 00 STA $00
4: A5 FE LDA $FE
6: 29 03 AND #$03
8: 18 CLC
9: 69 02 ADC #$02
B: 85 01 STA $01
D: A5 FE LDA $FE
F: A0 00 LDY #$00
11: 91 00 STA ($00),Y
13: 4C 00 06 JMP $0600
Finally any unknown opcode is turned into a dcb directive that instructs assembler to put bytes directly in the binary (used for initial data and such).
The web version is compiled into WebAssembly with emscripten and then embedded into this blog post.
Source
Sources on GitHub: https://github.com/jborza/6502dasm
Note: I’ve taken the liberty of including a couple of examples from 6502asm.com (by Stian Soreng) along with my unfinished brick breaker game as I’m a crummy 6502 programmer. Please also see the interactive Easy 6502 ebook by Nick Morgan.