Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

It's not "paper tape" (that's a digital storage medium), just a printout. And the numbers in the left half are not actually part of the source file, they are line numbers and machine code output produced by the assembler. You'd probably better not waste time transcribing them.

Not trying to dissuade you, but here's some things you should consider:

• Turn off your spell checker, it will only make this more difficult! It certainly won't help with the code itself, and it seems like you want to reproduce everything perfectly, including typos in the comments.

• I'd strongly suggest to at the very least become a bit familiar with 8080 assembly language before attempting this.

• The tools used to produce this output add another layer of complications. They used the PDP10 system's assembler with a set of macros to adapt it to generate 8080 code, so it's using somewhat different syntax and directives than those of 8080-native assemblers (like the ones from Intel or Digital Research).

• Some characters are hard to read, and without knowledge of the context and at least some of the PDP10-specific syntax it will be impossible to just guess. E.g. decimal numbers are sometimes prefixed with '^D', and octal numbers with '^O', which look quite similar in this scan. The 'RADIX' directive changes the default for when there is no such prefix, it should be 10 for most of it, but I think that it does start out as octal. Memory addresses will be octal (like 'RAMBOT==^O20000' in line 13), ASCII characters could be either but they seem to prefer decimal for those ('^D13' is CR, '^D10' is LF).




There are PDP-10 emulators with well-maintained copies of the different operating systems for them, so someone could check that the typed up source can be assembled.


I don't think it would help. As far as I can tell, the source doesn't include the macros needed to actually perform an assembly.


I do have some (surface-level) experience with GB/GBC assembly, but other than that I'm new. As for spell-checker, I've figured out how to rid myself of that. And the paper tape mix-up was just my inexperience.

All super interesting info!




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: