A86 (software)

"A386" redirects here. For the A road in England, see A386 road (Great Britain).

A86

Developer(s)	Eric Isaacson
Stable release	4.05
Operating system	DOS, Windows
Platform	x86
Type	Assembler
License	Proprietary
Website	http://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. ^ ^{a b} Eric Isaacson (2008). "A86/A386 assembler and D86/D386 debugger". http://eji.com/a86/. Retrieved 2008-07-02. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Randall Hyde. "Which Assembler is the Best?". http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AsmTools/WhichAsm.html. 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 3540235639. http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~rubin/courses/fall04/hydan.pdf. 

External links

• Official A86 site