Re: Base85 for DOS

On Fri, 23 Aug 2024 23:00:32 +0200
wolfgang kern <nowhere@never.at> wrote:

On 23/08/2024 21:17, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:
...

back then (~1984..) there were several tools available.
I wrote one 1985  as a DOS-extender,
but we had no internet so it was never published.
you may find a lot of later attempts from many sources now:
"HEX2BIN" or similar names with .ASM,.OBJ,.COM or even .EXE.

 

this task is/was that easy and short...
so whenever needed this few bytes can be written any time.

 

The 'problem' with debug output is that it has address prefixes and
display values at the end that need stripping out to get pure hex.

 
depending on file size limits part of the address field may be useful,
and the ASCII trail were just ignored by hex2bin.

You have to code for it, or maybe you'd pick up displayed valid hex codes

 

I could post code in hex, if that's more acceptable - it's just easier
for me to just CnP a debug dump.

 
your style is readable for me (after eye recovers from wrong treatment).
 

I did hex2bin and v versa a while back; OK I'll revisit it to have a
prog that does both.

 
AFAIR early DOS had debug.com, later vsn debug.exe.
hex_dump options were a bit different.

My xxd-r allows for both grdb and debug.exe dumps. I haven't tested it
under earlier DOS versions with possibly different dump format.

 
my OS contains only bin2hex as part of the implied debug+disass.
the address field vary with the chosen range and always show ASCII:

:           1         2         3         4         5         6

0123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
xxxx_xxxx 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07  08 09 0a 0b 0c 0d 0e 0f 8+1+8 chars.
so line length is 71 or 76 which fit into 80 char screens and .nws too.

I think xxd-r should handle that; it relies on there being 16 (hex pairs
+blank) +1 per line. Hmm, I should count pairs, not cols.

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.