FURBY.ASM

Please see:

• https://archive.org/details/furby-source
• https://twitter.com/bobpoekert/status/1028763109471580160
• http://www.seanriddle.com/furbysource.pdf

Unfortunately the PDF seems to be a rather low resolution greyscale scan of a printout. pdftohtml → tesseract did me little good, and unfortunately the "ABBYY FineReader 11.0 (Extended OCR)" version over on archive.org was not much more legible.

Some manual correction seems to be in order.

Conventions

1. unix line endings
2. emacs page break convention (^L / formfeed) at the end of each page for easier navigation
3. as close to vertically lined up as possible

Assumptions and knowledge

Character encoding mojibake issues

The file seems to have been stored as DOS codepage 437, then interpreted as ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252. Box-drawing characters that would have appeared in the B0-DF range are instead rendered as extended Latin characters, eg. Ä (0xC4 in Windows-1252) instead of ─ (0xC4 in CP437).

Column wrapping issues

Long lines in the file are often wrapped at column 72/73 in places that would have syntactic errors at compilation time. The length of hanging wrapped lines and the right margin positioning in some lines makes me think the original file was intended to be wrapped at columns 82/83 (assumption), though of course column 80 would make the most sense.

Programmatic correctness

I assume this was a printout of a working program, which implies that it should be possible to find an assembler that can parse the input file for at least syntactic validity. This would be an excellent check of transcription correctness, though of course not a perfect one (eg. typos in comment blocks).

Goals

Let's get all 297 pages of this PDF transcribed and committed to version control so we have a useful resource where it's possible to hyperlink to specific lines and file sections, perhaps eventually recover other versions of the source code, and learn more about the design of the device.

Todo

• transcribe all 297 pages
• correct CP1252/CP437 transliteration errors
  • ...with a programmatic transformation step
• correct column 72 / column 80 wrapping errors
  • ...with a programmatic transformation step
• identify an assembler that can (attempt to) compile the source
• figure out what kind of license makes sense for this..?