"I use a really obscure instruction set, designed by a bunch of ex-Peruvian monks, working from a bedsit in Shoreditch. You've probably never heard of it."
I really had to do that once. Reverse-engineer a wifi driver in an embedded board, some niche RISC instruction set invented by god knows who. Invented a disassemble-annotate-repeat tool called GOLEM based entirely on bitmap-pattern scripts, that would produce a listing. You could edit the listing to include symbolic names for code points and data, then re-run the tool and it would use those names (instead of hex addresses) in the new listing (built a symbol table iteratively). Ultimately I had complete source for the firmware again.
is GOLEM available publicly and under an open source license?
I wish. It was a project I did as a contractor. That company has changed source control systems twice since then, and been bought. I guess I should have kept a copy.
I asked; they're three source control systems further down the road (VSS => ClearCase => SVN => Git). My friend couldn't find it. Sigh.