A86 (software)

A86
Developer(s) Eric Isaacson
Stable release 4.05
Operating system DOS, Windows
Platform x86
Type Assembler
License Proprietary
Website eji.com/a86/

A86 is a compact commercial assembler developed for the Intel x86 family of microprocessors by Eric Isaacson. The assembler can directly produce a Windows/DOS compatible .COM or .OBJ file from a simple text source file. It uses a slightly simpler syntax for source code than that used by other assemblers, and it is optimized for maximum speed at both assembly and run times. It comes with a debugger, D86.[1][2]

A86/D86 target 16-bit x86 platforms. The companion products A386 and D386 are designed for 32-bit platforms.[1][2]

The A86 assembler was the first programming tool to automatically embed a "signature" into the code which it generated. Through its choice of instructions (many of which are functionally equivalent), it was possible to distinguish between registered and unregistered versions of the assembler, although access to the source code was required.[3]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Eric Isaacson (2008). "A86/A386 assembler and D86/D386 debugger". Archived from the original on 2 July 2008. Retrieved 2008-07-02.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Randall Hyde. "Which Assembler is the Best?". Archived from the original on 15 May 2008. Retrieved 2008-05-18.
  3. ↑ El-Khalil, Rakan; Keromyti, Angelos D. (2004). "Hydan: Hiding Information in Program Binaries". In Lopez, Javier; Qing, Sihan; Okamoto, Eiji. Information and communications security: 6th International Conference, ICICS 2004, Malaga, Spain, October 27–29, 2004 : Proceedings. Lecture notes in computer science 3269. Springer. p. 190. ISBN 3-540-23563-9.

External links