TSS8 DISKLOOK

[Rick Adams]

The TSS8 Manager's Guide gives the basics of DISKLOOK: examining the contents of disk and altering them.

I'm looking for instructions on how to search for specific values on the disk.

The documentation for the OS8 version of DISKLOOK that says you can use, say, 30000L to set a lower limit of the search, 37777U to set an upper limit, and 7326> or 7326< to search forward and backwards for a specific value.

But that doesn't work for TSS8 DISKLOOK, and I can't seem to find documentation that helps.  Is the TSS8 version of this utility just not capable of this?

[timr...@gmail.com]

Having never used it with TSS/8 all I can say is I would think the version included with the TSS/8 system would be a very rudimentary version.  You only have 4k to work with in the start up code.  I would expect it to allow you to specify locations to change and to change to what, but not much else.  If you have the guide does it describe that type of functionality?  OS/8 and TSS/8 are very different beasts.

[Rick Adams]

I remember I was able to search for specific values in the TSS8 code in some manner, with DISKLOOK or perhaps some other utility.  

[timr...@gmail.com]

From what I can tell by looking at the Systems Managers guide DISKLOOK for TSS/8 allows one to examine one disk location at a time.   You give the address.   TSS/8 shows the value and you can change it.  Rinse repeat.  That's it.

[Vincent Slyngstad]

On Monday, January 30, 2023 at 3:28:23 PM UTC-8 timr...@gmail.com wrote:

From what I can tell by looking at the Systems Managers guide DISKLOOK for TSS/8 allows one to examine one disk location at a time.   You give the address.   TSS/8 shows the value and you can change it.  Rinse repeat.  That's it.

Looking at the TSS source (it's hidden in init.pal), it appears Tim is correct.  Looks like ":", CR, and LF are the valid input terminators.

The source for decus-8-111 is available online, and it shouldn't be too hard to modify it to use TSS primitives for the disk accesses.

Vince