6 Nov
2012
6 Nov
'12
8:38 a.m.
On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, Ethan Dicks wrote:
I'm not joining in the kickstarter because I
already have a P112 I
purchased as a bare PCB and loose SMD parts in the previous round. I
just uncovered it last night moving some things around and started
tossing build-parts into a bin to put it together. I do happen to
have a couple of 32-pin JEDEC 512K SRAMs (originally for an SBC6120
RAM disk PCB that got destroyed in the mail), so I _can_ fully
populate it, but it got me wondering... what CP/M software is out
there (except maybe a RAM disk) that can *use* 1MB?
Years ago I was involved in development of a Z180/HD64180 coprocessor
board for Apple 2 systems. By including a couple of minor hooks in the
BIOS, we made it support the 180-specific Turbo Modula-2 compiler
originally marketed for the Circuit Cellar SB180. Through an overlay
mechanism you could use the extended memory as code space and run programs
that would otherwise not fit in a 16-bit address space. I do not know if
the P112 BIOS supports the extra entry points, but perhaps it wouldn't be
a difficult mod.
Alternately, you could write your own memory manager to fiddle the Z180
mapping registers and code in $language_of_your_choice.
Aside from that, I suspect ramdisk is the most common usage.
Steve
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