From: "SP" <spedraja at ono.com>
Hello. I own one Olivetti M-20 that I'm cleaning and checking. All appears
to go well but the diskette with the PCOS system is damaged. Someone dispose
of one operative copy of PCOS or another OS for this machine ? I would be
agreed for the eternity (uh... perhaps less time, but a lot sure).
Thanks
Sergio
Hi Sergio
What type of disk drives does it have? We have the ability
to create disk for the 320K drive but haven't had enough
experience to do this for the 640K disk.
If you have an AT level PC with a 360K drive, you may
be able to create the boot disk your self. The PC does
need to have a controller that writes FM format. Many
of the newer PC didn't support FM since most PC's
were only using MFM 360K or newer.
The first track on the 340K disk is done in FM ( single
density ) while all the rest are done in MFM ( double
density ).
Most M20's were shipped with memory cards that had
16K DRAMs. The motherboards usually had 128K of 64K
chips. With the three memory cards, at 32K each, the
normal configuration would be 224K. To run the CPM8000,
you'd need to have a minimum of 256K. This would require
having a memory card with 64K chips. I've modified
my memory cards to use the 64K chips. To bring up
CP/M-8000. Still, to make CP/M-8000 disks still requires
writing the first track with FM data.
PCOS runs fine on the 224K unless you want to run
some of the developement tools like PASCAL that
requires 384K as a minimum. Their BASIC runs fine in
the 224K machines.
Look at:
ftp://ftp.groessler.org/pub/chris/olivetti_m20/
There you'll find some images for PCOS and tools to create
disks. You can try the tool
wrm20.com, that I wrote.
If the controller you have is compatable with FM, you
should be able to create the boot disk. I'm also
told that the images are compatable with tools like
22disk but I've not confirmed this.
Look at:
http://www.cpm.z80.de/binary.html
For the CP/M-8000 stuff.
Worst case, I can send a floppy to you in the snail-mail.
Anyway, let me know what kind of machine you have,
like B&W or color, disk drives and RAM?
Later
Dwight