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Please read Bill Gates's Letter to Hobbyists and don't do this. He's not going to be happy that people are ripping off his Altair BASIC and not giving him any money. What you're doing is just not fair to him.
I don’t want to spoil your efforts, but I think the source is already online: https://github.com/option8/Altair-BASIC
No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape , I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!
Not trying to dissuade you, but here's some things you should consider:
• Turn off your spell checker, it will only make this more difficult! It certainly won't help with the code itself, and it seems like you want to reproduce everything perfectly, including typos in the comments.
• I'd strongly suggest to at the very least become a bit familiar with 8080 assembly language before attempting this.
• The tools used to produce this output add another layer of complications. They used the PDP10 system's assembler with a set of macros to adapt it to generate 8080 code, so it's using somewhat different syntax and directives than those of 8080-native assemblers (like the ones from Intel or Digital Research).
• Some characters are hard to read, and without knowledge of the context and at least some of the PDP10-specific syntax it will be impossible to just guess. E.g. decimal numbers are sometimes prefixed with '^D', and octal numbers with '^O', which look quite similar in this scan. The 'RADIX' directive changes the default for when there is no such prefix, it should be 10 for most of it, but I think that it does start out as octal. Memory addresses will be octal (like 'RAMBOT==^O20000' in line 13), ASCII characters could be either but they seem to prefer decimal for those ('^D13' is CR, '^D10' is LF).
Good luck on the exercise, though! Don't worry, Bill and his legal team will be watching you closely. They'll be cheering you on (but not for the reasons you think they will be.)
Heck, even CP/M 2.2 it's free software today.
Please read Bill Gates's Letter to Hobbyists and don't do this. He's not going to be happy that people are ripping off his Altair BASIC and not giving him any money. What you're doing is just not fair to him.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm having a struggle with this computer, it loves to correct Altair to Alta and I keep forgetting to correct it. Whoops.
You can add an exclusion or exception to your applicable spell check
Please read Bill Gates's Letter to Hobbyists and don't do this. He's not going to be happy that people are ripping off his Altair BASIC and not giving him any money. What you're doing is just not fair to him.
No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape , I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!
It's not "paper tape" (that's a digital storage medium), just a printout. And the numbers in the left half are not actually part of the source file, they are line numbers and machine code output produced by the assembler. You'd probably better not waste time transcribing them. Not trying to dissuade you, but here's some things you should consider: • Turn off your spell checker, it will only make this more difficult!…
All super interesting info!
No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape , I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!
It's not "paper tape" (that's a digital storage medium), just a printout. And the numbers in the left half are not actually part of the source file, they are line numbers and machine code output produced by the assembler. You'd probably better not waste time transcribing them. Not trying to dissuade you, but here's some things you should consider: • Turn off your spell checker, it will only make this more difficult!…