On 11/5/2013 9:40 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
I realize there is probably no one who cares anymore but I have always
had an interest in the firmware in the DR-200's of which I ran a couple
back in the early days of Packet. I alwyas thought the "Howie Code" was
a good routing system that never got a fair shake.

Now that I have thouroughly torqued off all the people who loved NetROM
instaid :-), let me continue.....

I have always wanted to play with the code to explore its possibilities.
I have tried contacting Howie Goldstein N2WX with no luck. I contacted
PACCOMM who agreed to search for the sourcecode for the firmware. I
never heard back (after three attempts over a period of several years)
so I assume they no longer even have a copy. That leaves only one option.
I plan to reverse engineer it. :-) Will definitely be a "clean room"
job as it appears I couldn't see the original source if my life depended
on it. :-)

So, in case there is at least one person here who might know, what language
was this written in? Most likely candidate is Z80 Assembler but given the
period during which it was done, it could also have been done in Pascal or
C. Knowing this will make hand dis-assembling it a little bit easier.

I know it seems a futile task with little ROI but, after all, this is
supposed to be a hobby so why not do the things we find to be fun? :-)

bill KB3YV


Bill,

I don't know, but my guess would be C. If you're familiar with the code
generated by the typical C compiler (back then there weren't as many
optimizations as today, so it should be easier), then a bit of
disassembly should give a pretty good idea if it is C or not.

It's possible that it is PASCAL, I guess, but I doubt it. PASCAL is a
great tool for learning, but it's overly strict rules make it less
common as a production language. It also typically generates larger
executables, and is less generally less useful as an OS.

Z80 assembler would also be a possibility, but it would be quite a bit
harder to code than a higher level language. Even though memory was
much less dense and more expensive back then, I think even C could be
used to generate the code. IIRC, the code for the TAPR TNC-2 was
written in C, for instance.

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Jerry, AI0K

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