This document describes the hexadecimal object file format for the Intel 8-bit， 16-bit， and 32-bit

　　microprocessors. The hexadecimal format is suitable as input to PROM programmers or hardware

　　emulators.

　　Hexadecimal object file format is a way of representing an absolute binary object file in ASCII. Because

　　the file is in ASCII instead of binary， it is possible to store the file is non-binary medium such as

　　paper-tape， punch cards， etc.; and the file can also be displayed on CRT terminals， line printers， etc.。 The

　　8-bit hexadecimal object file format allows for the placement of code and data within the 16-bit linear

　　address space of the Intel 8-bit processors. The 16-bit hexadecimal format allows for the 20-bit

　　segmented address space of the Intel 16-bit processors. And the 32-bit format allows for the 32-bit linear

　　address space of the Intel 32-bit processors.

　　The hexadecimal representation of binary is coded in ASCII alphanumeric characters. For example，

　　the 8-bit binary value 0011-1111 is 3F in hexadecimal. To code this in ASCII， one 8-bit byt

　　containing the ASCII code for the character ‘3’ （0011-0011 or 033H） and one 8-bit byte containing the

　　ASCII code for the character ‘F’ （0100-0110 or 046H） are required. For each byte value， the high-order

　　hexadecimal digit is always the first digit of the pair of hexadecimal digits. This representation （ASCII

　　hexadecimal） requires twice as many bytes as the binary representation.