Loading papertape into memory

[roelof...@yahoo.com]

Hi,

This should be a simple one I guess... Instead of running RT11 from an emulated disk, I just want to be able to load a BIN file into memory and run it from memory itself. Is there a BIN loader in the Unibone which makes it possible to just load a paper tape file into memory?

Regards, Roland

[Joerg Hoppe]

From my understanding, the format of binaries in RT11 is .SAV,
which are memory images encoded like papertape strips.

However there's an "Extended Save Image File Format" .SAV for separated
I-D space programs,
which is beyond the paper tape capabilities.

See

http://www.bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-11-XPTSA-A-D%20PDP-11%20Paper%20Tape%20Software%20Programming%20Handbook.pdf
page 6-11

and

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/rt11/v5.6_Aug91/AA-PD6PA-TC_RT-11_Volume_and_File_Formats_Manual_Aug91.pdf
page 2-32.

Not sure about the special record for the start address!

I think the "standard"  .SAV will be loadable by UniBone,
but they will mostly use RT11 Monitor subroutines and will not run
outside RT11.

No idea of .BIN

kind regards,

Joerg

[roelof...@yahoo.com]

Hi Joerg,

Thanks, but maybe I asked my question in the wrong way. I have an absolute paper tape image. I want to load that into memory. At the moment I'm loading this into the memory trough PDP11GUI which works fine. (The file doesn't have to do anything with RT11 so no need to emulate disks)

Now I want to setup de UniBone to just emulate memory and load that image file from the SD card directly into memory. I thought this should be an easy one...? It is a small file for a small machine. No separate I and D.

Regards, Roland

[Joerg Hoppe]

Hi,

>
> Thanks, but maybe I asked my question in the wrong way. I have an
> absolute paper tape image. I want to load that into memory. At the
> moment I'm loading this into the memory trough PDP11GUI which works
> fine. (The file doesn't have to do anything with RT11 so no need to
> emulate disks)
>
> Now I want to setup de UniBone to just emulate memory and load that
> image file from the SD card directly into memory. I thought this
> should be an easy one...?

Should be easy: the "demo" software, "device" menu has a command "m lp
<filename>" for this.

Joerg

[roelof...@yahoo.com]

Thanks Joerg,

I've got it up and running :-)

Regards, Roland