BIN loader?

[Bill E]

I've come across a number of prog tapes in bin format, but I can't find a loader for them. Any ideas? I think the way it worked was a rim format loader that you then used to load bin format tapes, but not sure.

[Angelo Papenhoff/aap]

Usually the bin loader should be at the start of the tape in RIM format so you can read it in and it will jump into the BIN loader and read the tape. but of course i don't know what tapes you have.

[Bill E]

Ok, I'll try some. I found a significant number of tape images on the bitsaver site, https://bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/pdp1/papertapeImages/, all in bin format. Guess I should have tried just loading one. :) Fortran anyone? There are also some ptp format images. If I remember correctly, those are loadable by the rim loader.

Bill

[Bill E]

No joy. The bin tapes look like they would if produced by macro. There's a text description punched, then what appears to be the bin loader, then the actual program. If I try to load via readin, have to push it a few times to get past the text label. Then, it reads the maybe-binloader, execution starts. But, the rest of the tape is never read. The -1 is definitely executing instructions, though.

Here's a sample tape:

[Oscar Vermeulen]

Bill,

Interesting - a new cache of PDP-1 paper tapes maybe?

You can now use tape_visualizer to inspect any tape image. It's easy to see what is on there with that - missing start block, missing RIM, or even just the matter of 'is this a binary or alphanumeric tape'?

The biggest stash of tape I found, through a tip of Al Kossow:

https://bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/mixed_media/paper_tape/

I've done a first trip through that stash of tapes, and found better ET, Macro and some other programs. I will provide a summary soonish though, as I work through them all.

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Norbert Landsteiner]

Hi,

just in case, I once documented the binary loader and how the data format works (it's actually from the TX-0, maybe there's also some Whirlwind prehistory?):

https://masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/insidespacewar-spacewar2bsa5.html

Having said that, there are are few .ppt files, which I failed to read (maybe just some data files?) and there are also a few corrupted files. (If I recall this correctly, the floating point interpreter, FLIP, is partially corrupted.)

Best,

Norbert

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[Bill E]

Thanks. I have now implemented my disassembler. It recognizes both RIM and BIN formats properly, including checksum validation for BINs.

Bill

[Oscar Vermeulen]

On Friday, September 19, 2025 at 2:37:33 PM UTC+2 wjegr...@gmail.com wrote:

Thanks. I have now implemented my disassembler. It recognizes both RIM and BIN formats properly, including checksum validation for BINs.

That is exciting - will you share, or is it too early for trying out?

We'll get to a nice PDP-1 development environment soon with this and the things Angelo is working on. And we have the encode_fiodec / decode_fiodec / tape_visualizer tools to move data back and forth.

Kind regards,

Oscar.