27 Mar
2002
27 Mar
'02
11:37 p.m.
From: Richard Erlacher <edick(a)idcomm.com>
There's plenty of CP/M software out there. All you
need to do is find one
of
the mirrors of the late Tim Olmstead's unofficial
CP/M site.
There are several still up, The last location of Tim's site is back up.
original MSDOS' EDLIN. The editor of choice for
CP/M would probably be
WordStar, of which there are several versions for CP/M. It does come with
an
If you can find VEDIT, that is a very powerful screen editor with TECO macro
from the command mode.
Select the editor you want, keeping in mind that little
of this stuff is
much
use without a hard disk, which is not "rocket
science" to add, provided you
can snag a drive of the CP/M era. IDE drives are a mite more trouble, as
are
SCSI types, but it's all been done. The maximum
size for a CP/M 2.2 (plain
IDE offers the easiest of the lot to get and interface if the board was hard
disk
impared.
vanilla version) system is 8 MB, and you can only have
as many as 16
drives,
including the floppies.
Thats per logical drive. A larger hard disk can be partitioned.
Or run one of the CP/M clones like P2DOS, ZRDOS, SUPRBDOS
as these have 32mb or higher logical disk limits.
My understanding is that if you have a 60 MB drive,
you can stick all the software that was ever published for CP/M, including
sources, on it and still have room left. Some folks disagree, but I almost
I'd agree, actually most of the good must have stuff will fit easily on a 10
to 20mb drive with room to spare. The WC CP/M CDrom was I think under
100mb and that had whole libraries of several SIGs.
believe that. Somebody sent me a CD of CP/M stuff that
purportedly
contained
pretty much "everything" there was, and it
was barely 10% utilized.
Several
CD's have been published, but most have what
amounts to multiple copies of
the
same stuff on them, so their capacity is not
representative of what you
might
need storage-wise.
The Walnut Creek cdrom is by far the most complete and maybe 10% utilized.
It's out of print but copies can be had. For serious CP/M users and
collectors
it's a must have along with the archivers used (ark, ARC, LHA, LBR...etal).
Another thing to keep in mind is that the BigBoard runs
at just over 2 MHz
(2.5?). I've got several but really haven't considered how fast they run
in
the original version, because I'm into hot-rodding.
The software versions
I
have don't use mode-2 interrupts, so one wonders
why the designer used
those
awkward Z80 peripherals that do little more than ensure
that you can't run
the
CPU faster than the peripherals, even though the CPU is
quite capable of
it.
Of course, the fact that the entire board is out of the
Mostek and Zilog
app-notes might explain that.
4mhz should be doable with minor effort. faster is as Dick said hampered
by the lack of suitably fast Z80 peripherals.
Allison