Two 32‐channel side‐viewing soft x‐ray diode arrays will be installed on PBX‐M which will provide profile information in the horizontal and vertical directions with a time resolution up to 1 &mgr;s. The information from these arrays can be reconstructed to provide a high time‐resolution poloidal emission profile using a maximum‐entropy‐based technique which incorporates the reconstructed profile from a tangentially viewing soft x‐ray pinhole camera. The pinhole camera provides lower time‐resolution (about 5 ms) shape information which has been reconstructed with the assumption of toroidal symmetry. The pinhole camera information supplements the information from the diode arrays, allowing a reconstruction which can resolve MHD fluctuations of the equilibrium profile. The pinhole camera information need only be a better approximation to the real emission profile than the assumption of a flat profile since the algorithm uses it as a first‐order solution which is perturbed by the information from the diode arrays. The algorithm can also explicitly include the bean‐shaped PBX‐M vacuum vessel and the vignetting of some detectors by the pusher coil.