How to copy a program!

N1ght2lay3r

I am not sure if this is possible and I cant seem to find this.I created a program and didn't save it but its still on my basic stamp is it possible to download it and save the program? NEVER MIND!!!

Mike Green

No. It's not possible. That's why you haven't found anything so far.

Even if you could get the program off the Stamp, it's in compiled form. There's no way to display or edit it. All you could do is download it to another Stamp.

CalMariner

As I understand it, this is by design, to protect developers' intellectual property. A good idea, to be sure, but it does occasionally make our lives difficult.

Mike Green

It's not that Parallax deliberately designed the Stamp to protect developer's intellectual property, but they did not go out of their way to make it easy. The downloaded program is in a highly compressed form to make the best use of a limited amount of EEPROM and to minimize the effect of a relatively slow memory during execution. Although a program can read the EEPROM and send it to the PC, the smallest program that can do this takes some room and will overlay part of whatever existing program is in the EEPROM, so you can't read all of it. Once someone gets the downloaded program, it's still very time consuming to decode it and translate it into something that will recompile. In addition, any variable names, comments, and label name are not present, so, if the program is complex, that'll make it hard to understand. It would be possible to either unsolder the EEPROM from the module to read the whole program or use some very fine probes to connect to the EEPROM and do the same thing.

CalMariner

Wow. I think that I will just continue to binder-ize all of my code.