[TenTec] [Orion] Orion II Noise Blankers

[Grant Youngman]

> 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