18 Apr
2007
18 Apr
'07
11:11 p.m.
Damn, I was hoping to have the only Epson PX-8; as far
as I know the only
CP/M system to do (micro)cassette tapes.
No I have one too.
The Epson PX4 was also a CP/M machine that used microcassette tapes, but
the tape drive was an option module (fitted in the area to the right of
the display) and I don't have it in mine
I do have the 5.25" disk drive unit for these machines -- the TF20. It's
darn complex inside -- a Z80, 64K RAM, a boot ROM that's switched out
after intitialisation, a disk controller and a serial port. Oh and a pair
of those Epson 1/3 height voice-coil floppy drives.
I was once told that the TF20 boots a modified CP/M/fileserver program
from the system disk. Does anyone know if that's
true?
Oh, and I've got a Sharp MZ-80B which I believe
will run CP/M.
That's another machine I have and which I missed off the earlier list...
Along with the Apple ][ + Softcard.
Shame I've not the foggiest how to use it. I can get Wordstar running on one
of the PX-8s, but only because it's in ROM. I can do DIR and run a program -
does it do anything else?
CP/M has very few built-in commands, most of the stuff you'd expect to be
built in -- like copying a file -- is done by separate programs loaded
from disk (to copy a file you use PIP, for example).
On the PX8, there was a standard utilities ROM that contained PIP. STAT,
and the other common CP/M programs. If you don't have that in your
machine, get tie image of the web and burn it to EPROM. You need it.
What more do you expect it to do (other than run programs)? CP/M is a
very simple OS, it doesn't do much more than that :-)
-tony