I got the ebook when it came out, and is relatively nice as ramp up into the world of compiler development.

Speaking of embedded systems, I have an old board, an offshoot of Zilog Z80 called Rabbit. I think recently Dave from EEVBlog took apart one of his ancient projects and I was floored to see a Rabbit. Talk about a left hook. Assuming this is Hacker News, I suspect someone probably knows what I’m talking about. The language used (called “Dynamic C”) has some unconventional additions, a kind of coroutine mechanism in addition to chaining functions to be called one after another in groups. It’s mostly C otherwise, so I suspect some macro shennanigans with interrupt vector priority for managing this coroutine stuff.

Anyhow, so I’ve got a bunch of .bin files around for it, no C source code, just straight assembly output ready to be flashed. And the text and data segments are often interwoven, each fetch being resolved to data or instruction in real time by the rabbit processor. So I’ve been thinking of sitting down, going through the assembly/processor manual for the board and just writing a board simulator hoping to get it back to source code by blackbox reversing in a sense. I’d have to rummage through JEDEC for the standard used by the EEPROM to figure out what pins it’s using there and the edge triggering sequences. Once I can execute it and see what registers and GPIOs are written when, I can probably figure out the original code path. Not sure if anyone has tips or guides or suggestions here.