DL11 configuration for pdp11gui

Mouse mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Mon Jun 27 09:30:06 CDT 2016


>> Mostly PDP11GUI does not care, either 7b or 8b.
> I'm kind of surprised to hear that; I assumed that PDP11GUI can
> download binaries, and for that, 8-bit is kind of necessary?

Depends on the protocol.  While it's not a PDP-11, my own Dreamcast
serial-line code sends binaries over a serial line as hex.  It doubles
the octet count sent (for the data - there's some other overhead too)
but requiring nothing beyond plain text of the comm channel.  I'm sure
there are plenty of other serial-line protocols that encode more
compactly; if you use the 95 printable ASCII characters (space through
tilde), you can pack 32 bits of binary into 5 characters with less than
one bit of spare space; you can even reserve 10 characters for other
purposes (eg, framing) and still pack 32 bits of binary into 5
characters.

About the most compact packing I see is 32 binary octets into 39
base-95 values.  In theory it's possible to do better, but not much,
and even this much is not convenient to do.

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