How are hex sequence translated to assembly without ambiguity?

Question

8B EC 56 8B F4 68 00 70 40 00 FF 15 BC 82 40   

A senquence like above can be segmented in various ways,each segment can be translated to correspon

Answer 1

Dont confuse linearly trying to disassemble with execution order of code. The binary is decoded in execution order, starting with a known location. Other than intentional hacks for various reasons there is no ambiguity.

Try writing a disassembler for a variable word length instruction set. At the end of the day it has to be done in execution order, and even there you can only disassemble some of the program as some branches can be based on addresses computed at run time. Modern compiler generated code is much better than older hand assembled code. In an old standup arcade game for example there are conditional branches preceeded by an instruction that guarantees that only one of the conditions is met (why was that in there? we will never know) and the data that follows the conditional branch resembles an opcode in such a way that you run into a collision with other opcodes.

Old dos programs trying to defeat disassemblers would have self modifying code, one instruction would modify another instruction one or two instructions ahead, if single stepped that modification would happen, but if run at full speed the instruction was already fetched in the pipeline, and the modified/broken one in memory was not used. pretty neat trick.

Anyway, the answer to your question is do not look at the bytes in linear order, look at them in execution order starting at the addresses defined by the reset and other vectors in the vector table.