This is a great comment. I love that people like you are on Hacker News and it is why I appreciate this site so much.
Thanks! It's gratifying that the reminiscences of a graybeard like me can still resonate with readers here.
> Microware's OS-9 operating system
I loved OS-9 on the 6809. It was my introduction into unix-ish-like systems that led into SunOS and later Linux and the foundations of my career.
I also wrote a source-generating disassembler for a 8-bit i8080-based Soviet-designed computer, RADIO-86RK — because I wanted to improve software published in the magazine. And explore stuff.
Don't suppose you have any links to any useful resource/tools for disassembling an old CD-i game that would have been written in C for the 68000 on Microware OS-9? I've got so far with ghidra but the OS-9 plugins available are either outdated or don't fully handle the instruction set for OS-9.
If I can add any more info, let me know.
The first thing I'd usually do when starting on a new architecture was write a disassembler. In the late 70s, I was mostly programming in 6809 assembly, usually in Microware's OS-9 operating system. Microware released a Pascal compiler, so I ran my disassembler over that. Turns out the compiler was self-hosting, written in Pascal, and the compiler output was almost completely unoptimized. So I decompiled the compiler back to Pascal by hand, just to see how it worked. I obviously had waaaaay more free-time back then.
I eventually read the green Dragon book (Aho & Ullman, Principles of Compiler Design), and ended up at Microsoft on the C/C++ team in 1991. Over the years, I've written several domain-specific languages (DSLs), small languages for some limited purpose. That early exposure to lexing, parsing, and error detection was invaluable.