ebd: Eight Bit Dump

A hexdump utility for 8 bit software development.

An alternative to modern hexdump utilities, ebd is designed for anyone using modern systems to develop software for older 8 bit processors such as the 6502, Z80, etc.

Its style is inspired by the Apple II system monitor program and outputs 8 bit bytes with the option to show ASCII characters too. It is fixed to 8 bytes per row, with a 16 bit address which rolls over after each 64k. If you need more address space this probably isn't the tool for you.

I basically failed in using format strings in hexdump which comes with macOS and decided it would be faster to write this little utility.

Written in Python 2.7 because that was just easier for now.

Usage

Just pass a file to ebd and you'll get a hexdump of it's contents:

ebd -f [filename]

Custom starting address

Use the -a parameter to pass a different starting address for the output (in decimal):

ebd -f [filename] -a [starting address]

Display ASCII text

Add the -d flag to display the ASCII text column in the output:

ebd -f [filename] -d

Installation

You can either just call the Python script directly or you could follow something like this for installing on *nix systems:

chmod a+x ebd.py

sudo cp ebd.py /usr/local/bin/ebd

Now you can call ebd [options] from any directory on your system.

C Version

Long term, I'd like to write a version of ebd in C, along with a few extra features at the same time. Maybe one day I'll get around to that.