I don't know if it creats some kind of annonymous identifyer or not, but if you put it in the data section of your code, or anywhere that isn't executed (for obvious safety resons) you can easily make sure that no one just steals your DLLs and programs and calls them their own. (This is assuming that they don't know assembly or that they're not expecting you to actually put a copyright identifier in there.)

It also is a nice way of temporarily commenting your code for looking at sections in a hex editor.

this is a great idea, i've use something similar in c++ apps wrapped in a macro EmbedString(psz) which would be turned off or on with conditional compilation, it makes things a bit easier when disassembling memory dumps, though I'm a bit of a noob with fasm's macro syntax, is it possible to do in fasm? I'm curious if a macro can take an instruction as a parameter and both embed the textual representation of the instruction and emit the opcode. It could be very handy in debugging to have say, a .d or .dump macro .dump mov eax, ebx.

jmp @F
db 'mov eax, ebx'
@@:
mov eax, ebx[/code]

Not sure what you mean, but you could probably do it in 2 seperate instructions. And if you mean using fasm to take a source code and assemble it and put the source beside it, only jumped over, you could probably edit the fasm source to do that.

[code]
DEBUG=1 ;change to 0 to disable
macro embedstring str
{
local ..forward
if DEBUG=1
jmp ..forward
db str,0
..forward:
end if
}
embedstring "abcd"
embedstring <"abcd",10,13,"xxx">

Sorry I was unclear, what I mean is it would be nice to have a single macro that both embeds the text of the instruction being executed and encodes the instruction. something quick and dirty like a D macro.



produces

jmp ..forward
db 'NOP'
..forward
NOP

This way the NOP instruction is both assembled and the string 'NOP' is embedded in the binary before it's executed. It would help when looking at memory dumps, one could read which instructions were being executed at given locations because the string representation of the instruction will be displayed. It would certainly over-bloat the binary but should be able to turn off instruction string embedding after debugging similar to vid's example.

Well, the listing is a much more traditional approach to this problem, however here's my quick try to make a macro like what you proposed:

I take it that listing is the same thing only it dosn't rely on the macro?

But they could easily find this by opening your app in a hex editor and then replace your string with theirs (if it is equal in length; and if it is shorter, pad it up with spaces or NULs)