Hi all,
Iain Hancock has asked me to pass the following message on to the list:
Hi
Myself and a few others are collating disks, disk images and programs
for the Research Machines 380z. It's a CP/M machine that was widely
used in UK schools in the early 80's just before the BBC micro was
launched. It provided the first use many British schoolkids had of
micro's and computer programming, and along with it's software played
a very important part in the 1980's uk computer revolution.
Anyway, there were a surprising number of specific educational and
games programs written for it (and hundreds of games written on it by
schoolkids, inc me ) that are in danger of disappearing with the
dreaded disk-rot. Hence we are trying to locate any Research Machines
disks we can, before it's too late
Presently we have imaged & extracted about 50 disks worth; they will
go on the yahoo 380z group and an archive site we're setting up,
www.rml380z.org
Please does anyone here have any 380z (or 480z) disks you might have
picked up along the way?
We've been imaging them to IMD's and using the normal tools to
extract. Have a script to extract individual files and provide dir
listings so we'll get them up on the site in no time. If anyone can
share images they've done please let me know, or we can make images
here and return disks to you...
cheers!
Iain, UK
PS if anyone can find a copy of an rml basic program "ace invaders",
extra points will be awarded :-)
I've dug out a bunch of RM floppies from my collection, and there were
a few in Don Maslin's archive that I've also passed on to Iain.
We've imaged floppies in these formats (cpmtools diskdefs file) so far:
http://offog.org/stuff/rm/rm-diskdefs
... but there are also some RM 8" formats defined in the manuals,
which we've not found any examples of yet. It appears that RM used
0x28 as the first byte in their CP/M serial numbers.
Thanks,
--
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> <http://offog.org/>