Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Dec 20, 2024

I love finding a mysterious NOP in a released binary.

Someone patched this. Compilers don't usually just stick a NOP in the middle of a functional call.

Unless they're MIPS or similar, I guess, but there are very few MS-DOS games that run on MIPS processors

Show threadNewNewDougDec 20, 2024
@foone Alignment?
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Dec 20, 2024
@NewNewDoug x86 don't give a shit about alignment, at least pre-SSE
Show threadgloriouscow

@foone @NewNewDoug

they care for speed reasons. 8086 will waste a bus cycle reading/fetching from odd addresses, and when we went to a 32-bit data bus with the 386 there were similar penalties for being out of dword alignment.

so seeing a nop before a jump target at an odd address isn't that weird

Dec 20, 2024 at 5:24amWeb