3 ms·

Z80 Sans – a disassembler in a font (2024)

154 points by pabs3 7mo ago

tgv 7mo ago
This made me smile. What an astonishing combination. The oddball application of a font as a disassembler works like a wonderful practical joke to me. Merging parsing, processing and rendering into a single step feels mad genius.
notglossy 7mo ago
Man... I'm lucky if the fonts I'm using even have tabular figures as alternates. This is on a whole other level.
userbinator 7mo ago
Not too surprising given that a font maps bytes into glyphs, and an instruction set maps them to instructions. I suspect a 6502 or 8051 version would be much simpler.
- dhosek 7mo ago
  Definitely. I wrote an incomplete z80 disassembler as a high school student back in the 80s, but never got to the 2-byte opcodes. 6502 has none of those so would be much easier to manage.
ilaksh 7mo ago
I guess it would be cheating, but he actually could have just written it in Rust, since OpenType can execute web assembly. People have abused that to embed things like Tetris and even an LLM inside of fonts. What he did was more impressive in a way.
- erk__ 7mo ago
  It's not OpenType that can execute wasm it's a experimental extension in HarfBuzz so compared to this it does not work online since it is not enabled for the HarfBuzz builds in Chrome or Firefox. Which makes this more cool to show of online. (disclaimer, I made the Tetris font)
Averave 7mo ago
You can do a lot of crazy things with fonts. Just off the top of my head: Tetris Font - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40737294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40737294 A font which is also an LLM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791 And in the same vein: Tetris in a PDF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218 Doom in a PDF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678754
- pwnfunction 7mo ago
  next is to build a disassembled inside a pdf
  - aa-jv 7mo ago
    Alchemist Owl got there already: https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/ https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/ POC||GTFO is one of those things that, once you dive in, you will never regret taking the effort to fully grok. ... AI-Generated summary of issues relating to disassembly: PoC||GTFO 0x10 (pocorgtfo10.pdf, January 2016): Titled around "IN THE THEATER OF LITERATE DISASSEMBLY," this entire issue focuses on reverse engineering and disassembly. It includes articles and examples involving disassembly of various systems (e.g., mentions of built-in monitors and naive disassemblers like in Apple ][ contexts, along with reverse engineering hood-lifting). It heavily features disassembly as a theme, with likely code listings and explanations that effectively serve as or demonstrate disassembler usage/output. PoC||GTFO 0x21 (pocorgtfo21.pdf, February 2022): This issue explicitly mentions a "Notebook of Altera NIOS Disassembly" in its content/description. Articles cover disassembly (e.g., of Altera NIOS soft-core processor code), and one notes that while focused on disassembly, full target plugins would include an assembler, disassembler, code analysis, etc. This strongly indicates the PDF contains disassembly examples, outputs, or even PoC implementations/discussions of disassembler functionality for that architecture. Other issues occasionally include disassembly snippets or references (e.g., 0x11, 0x13, 0x15 show snippets like disassembled code blocks for specific exploits or systems), but they are more incidental rather than centered on a disassembler tool or example.
- 7mo ago
iberator 7mo ago
Ha ha this is the best thing I have seen today in hacker news! So clever and funny
billforsternz 7mo ago
I thought my Z80 project (https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon) was close to the whimsical end of the practical to just for fun spectrum but this takes things to a whole new level, kudos.
localhost 7mo ago
i had gpt-5.4 write a 6502 font version of this font [1] in between working on other things. super fun and learned a lot by watching it do its thing. [1] https://github.com/jflam/6502-sans https://github.com/jflam/6502-sans

154 points by pabs3 7mo ago

tgv 7mo ago

This made me smile. What an astonishing combination. The oddball application of a font as a disassembler works like a wonderful practical joke to me. Merging parsing, processing and rendering into a single step feels mad genius.

notglossy 7mo ago

Man... I'm lucky if the fonts I'm using even have tabular figures as alternates. This is on a whole other level.

userbinator 7mo ago

Not too surprising given that a font maps bytes into glyphs, and an instruction set maps them to instructions. I suspect a 6502 or 8051 version would be much simpler.

dhosek 7mo ago
Definitely. I wrote an incomplete z80 disassembler as a high school student back in the 80s, but never got to the 2-byte opcodes. 6502 has none of those so would be much easier to manage.

ilaksh 7mo ago

I guess it would be cheating, but he actually could have just written it in Rust, since OpenType can execute web assembly. People have abused that to embed things like Tetris and even an LLM inside of fonts. What he did was more impressive in a way.

erk__ 7mo ago
It's not OpenType that can execute wasm it's a experimental extension in HarfBuzz so compared to this it does not work online since it is not enabled for the HarfBuzz builds in Chrome or Firefox. Which makes this more cool to show of online. (disclaimer, I made the Tetris font)

Averave 7mo ago

You can do a lot of crazy things with fonts. Just off the top of my head: Tetris Font - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40737294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40737294 A font which is also an LLM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791 And in the same vein: Tetris in a PDF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218 Doom in a PDF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678754

pwnfunction 7mo ago
next is to build a disassembled inside a pdf
- aa-jv 7mo ago
  Alchemist Owl got there already: https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/ https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/ POC||GTFO is one of those things that, once you dive in, you will never regret taking the effort to fully grok. ... AI-Generated summary of issues relating to disassembly: PoC||GTFO 0x10 (pocorgtfo10.pdf, January 2016): Titled around "IN THE THEATER OF LITERATE DISASSEMBLY," this entire issue focuses on reverse engineering and disassembly. It includes articles and examples involving disassembly of various systems (e.g., mentions of built-in monitors and naive disassemblers like in Apple ][ contexts, along with reverse engineering hood-lifting). It heavily features disassembly as a theme, with likely code listings and explanations that effectively serve as or demonstrate disassembler usage/output. PoC||GTFO 0x21 (pocorgtfo21.pdf, February 2022): This issue explicitly mentions a "Notebook of Altera NIOS Disassembly" in its content/description. Articles cover disassembly (e.g., of Altera NIOS soft-core processor code), and one notes that while focused on disassembly, full target plugins would include an assembler, disassembler, code analysis, etc. This strongly indicates the PDF contains disassembly examples, outputs, or even PoC implementations/discussions of disassembler functionality for that architecture. Other issues occasionally include disassembly snippets or references (e.g., 0x11, 0x13, 0x15 show snippets like disassembled code blocks for specific exploits or systems), but they are more incidental rather than centered on a disassembler tool or example.
7mo ago

iberator 7mo ago

Ha ha this is the best thing I have seen today in hacker news! So clever and funny

billforsternz 7mo ago

I thought my Z80 project (https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon) was close to the whimsical end of the practical to just for fun spectrum but this takes things to a whole new level, kudos.

localhost 7mo ago

i had gpt-5.4 write a 6502 font version of this font [1] in between working on other things. super fun and learned a lot by watching it do its thing. [1] https://github.com/jflam/6502-sans https://github.com/jflam/6502-sans