> simply open the file with it. You'll see a neatly laid-out,
> extremely long but totally incomprehensible matrix of hex
> numbers. It goes on for thousands of lines.
Actually it's very well organized in a straightforward ASCII style loader
format, each line ending with a CR/LF, etc. It's easier to see by just
loading a .ruf file into Notepad, and setting it for a fixed width font
(courier).
If you could build a memory image by emulating the loader, and knew where
the code was entered at startup, you could maybe develop the structure of
code blocks and data blocks, and back-translate into readible assembler for
the various machines in the box.
Not the easiest thing to try to hack without a better understanding of
structure -- like all the DOCUMENTED C-something code, or whatever it's
actually written in :-)
I once converted a FORTH interpreter from one machine to another at the hex
level (this was in the early 8080/Z-80 days around the mid-70's). Hand
back-translated hex to a pseudo assembler code. Modified it. Wrote new I/O
handlers, hand assembled the new code, and entered and debugged and fixed it
all through nothing but a hex editor. If I hadn't known how the orginal was
structured it would have been -- well, not impossible, but ... ok, pretty
near impossible. Once the basic FORTH interpreter was running, I
bootstrapped myself up by writing a simple assembler in FORTH itself to
finished the job. And that was a trivial task compared to starting with
nothing but hex machine code for a multi-processor box as complex as the
Orion. Wears me out just thinking about it :-)
Grant/NQ5T
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