Stamps and the tokenized code on them
Buck Rogers
Posts: 2,187
in BASIC Stamp
Hello!
Would someone please confirm this line of reasoning: "That once a program has been written and appropriately edited once syntax errors are found by the tokenizer and are of course corrected, and then sent to the Stamp, the process turns the program into the proprietary format, and as such cannot be recovered from the device."
Mascot away visiting relatives in CA.
Comments
It can mostly be recovered, although nobody seems to talk much about it. As far as I'm aware, you can't recover the whole thing because you have to overwrite a small part of it with your EEPROM dumper program.
Depends on how you define "recovered." You could pull the EEPROM from the board, dump the contents, and do some analysis. I'm memory serves me, Scott Edwards may have decoded the BS2 tokens. In the end it seems like a reverse-engineering effort would be less costly than attempting to recover and disassemble code from the EEPROM.
It was Brian Forbes who reverse decoded the BASIC Stamp 2, and self-published a monograph, “Inside the BASIC Stamp 2”. Not endorsed by Parallax and no longer available afaik. Brian started his work based on work by Chuck Mcmanis to reverse engineer the BASIC Stamp 1. That is still available on line at http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/stamp-decode.html
The coding is Chip Gracey clever, and is complicated by the fact that it uses variable length tokens that do not generally align with byte boundaries.
Thanks for the correction, Tracy.
That's odd I wonder why the Brian Forbes one has disappeared
And I second that! Actually group the responses I've gotten are perfect.