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larsbrinkhoff / pdp10-its-disassembler

Disassembler and other tools for files in ITS formats
GNU General Public License v2.0
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BLKI, or hardware read-in format. #140

Open larsbrinkhoff opened 2 years ago

larsbrinkhoff commented 2 years ago

This is the format used by hardware read-in mode. It's started by a BLKI pointer word, and then followed by a block of words specified by that pointer. The last word in that block is the start instruction.

In effect hardware read-in does this:

  1. DATAI device,0
  2. BLKI device,0
  3. JRST @0
larsbrinkhoff commented 2 years ago

Note that the already supported rim10 format is a special case of this. It also runs the code that was loaded, in order to execute the paper tape bootstrap which reads the rest of the tape.

larsbrinkhoff commented 2 years ago

Reading this format is easy. However, writing needs a way to pass in the start and end of the memory region.