>         How do you go about converting the source code if you don't have
 >         a source converter!

By studying and analysing disassembly.

 >         I have seen these converters before so why is it impossible.

It depends on whether you consider that what you have seen is adequate.

 >                 Please fill me in on the details. BTW....the program
 >         is a windows program, does that make any difference!!!

I don't see why it should.

I wish you luck in your ghost hunting though. I don't doubt that you may
have seen some software which claimed to do this, but whether it actually
did it is an entirely different thing.

FWIW, I have seen a program which did this in a way (it was for 386 code
only), but it was hardly adequate for doing much  more than placing C
function wrappers around inline assembly. It also required that the
original program have all debug data still present in either Borland TLink
or MicroSoft (CodeView) format. The "code" it produced wasn't
adequate for very much and would rarely if ever produce the same output
when recompiled. The decompiler was easily confused by some constructs,
particularly where the original program was either not written in C or
contained modules written in assembler which used anything but standard C
compiler conventions (ie. not placing variables into the code segment etc).
It certainly couldn't handle some things such as tables used by switch()
constructs where were placed anywhere but in a data segment. As for any
'real' C code beyond function calls - forget it. It is simply a
disassembler which outputs some things in C format, which is pretty much a
joke as far as I'm concerned.

I'll remain skeptical about this until I see something with my own eyes
which actually does what it advertises. So far I haven't.


  cheers,
  david

---