Tek 4051 firmware listing

[Josh Dersch]

On 12/9/2010 9:12 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
> Josh Dersch wrote:
> > I was considering it, but it's about 950 pages which makes it a 
> rather daunting task.
>
> I typed in around that many pages of listings on two different 
> occasions, once for the HP-41C mainframe ROM source code, and once for 
> HP 2000C Time-Shared BASIC.  Each project took a few weeks of spare 
> time.  However, I don't have spare time any more, so I'm not likely to 
> do this for the Tek listings.

That's dedication :).


>
> > Is there any OCR software that can deal with this sort of thing? 
> This is
> > potentially made more complicated by the fact that there are horizontal
> > lines across most of the pages, which in many cases intersect with 
> the text
> > (which also isn't the clearest text I've ever seen).
>
> The aforementioned source code listings were in better shape than this 
> Tek listing, and didn't have horizontal lines, but I couldn't find any 
> OCR package that could handle them.  It would have taken far longer to 
> clean up the OCR output than it took me to type it in myself.  OCR is 
> designed for business letters, not code listings.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I expected.  I guess even if the OCR 
software was robust enough to deal with the lines in the images, the 
occasional bits of noise in the resulting text would be very annoying to 
track down and correct.

>
> What I did in each case was:
> 1) typed in the listing *including* the line numbers, address, and 
> object code
> 2) used an awk script to process that into a source file
> 3) wrote an assembler compatible with the original HP assembler
> 4) assembled the source code, producing a listing file
> 5) compared the listing file output by the assembler to the listing I 
> typed in
> 6) correct errors
> 7) lather, rinse, repeat
>

I'd love to do something like that with these Tek sources, and then tie 
it in with the emulator I've been toying with, but I just don't think I 
have the time.  It'd be really nice to have the emulator's debugger be 
able to match up the current instruction with line(s) from the source 
files, etc...

Josh