FCode Tools is a (slowly growing) collection of tools for working with Sun Microsystems OpenBoot firmware (FCode). The primary development platforms are Solaris 7 and NetBSD 10, with periodic testing on a current Linux system.
I currently only provide a binary package for Solaris 7:
MDXfcode-v0.2-sparc.pkg.
It can be installed using the pkgadd command. By default, this will install
the package in /opt/MDXfcode. You will probably want to add
/opt/MDXfcode/bin to your PATH variable.
To compile, simply run make in the repositories root directory. This will
compile the sources and run some regression tests. Before doing this,
however, take a moment to check the src/Makefile.`uname` file for
your system. On a reasonably modern system you should only have to set the
CC variable to your preferred C compiler.
To compile on older systems, you may need to make additional changes (have a
look at src/Makefile.SunOS.) Currently you will need, at a minimum, a
working vsnprintf implementation. The earliest version of Solaris to
provide one is Solaris 2.6.
If you manage to compile the sources, you will be left with a binary named
fcode in the src directory. Simply place it somewhere in your path, e.g.,
in /usr/local/bin or $HOME/bin.
Running the fcode executable will print the following usage instructions:
usage: fcode [-h|-v] fcode detokenize [-2|-3] [-o <output.fth>] input.fcode fcode extract [-o <output.fcode>] input.bin
Running fcode -v prints version information, fcode -h or any invalid
option will again print the above usage instructions.
The fcode detokenize command reads FCode from the specified input file and
writes the detokenized output Forth code to the output file (if specified) or
to the standard output. The options -2 and -3 select which FCode version
to treat the input as. The default is version 2.
The fcode extract command tries to locate FCode inside the specified input
binary file. The output will be written to the specified file or, if none is
given, to a file in the current directory with the same name as the input file
but with an extension of .fcode.
An FCode tokenizer is a work in progress and I hope to add it soon. At least on Solaris you can use Sun’s own FCode tokenizer until then. It is available here on the internet archive. Don’t use Sun’s detokenizer, though. It has some very annoying bugs, which is the reason I wrote my own in the first place.