13 Oct
2000
13 Oct
'00
10:12 a.m.
"Bill Layer" <b.layer(a)vikingelectronics.com> wrote:
---snip---
before I joined the company). The MDS was given me by
an engineer here, and
came with a pile of disks and no documentation.
I have documentation on ISIS but it would be a bit much for
me to copy ( hundreds of pages ). The documentation I have
is for a MDS-800 so it doesn't have the up to date hardware
information on your machine. They did make the machines vary
software compatable, though. There is some low level
code used to get things started but the documents have enough
information on how to do things like writing directly to disk
and such. I once did a early FIG Forth that started from
ISIS and then did block disk I/O. It wasn't that difficult.
It ran on both the MDS-800's and series II that we had when
I was at Intel ( '78-'83 ).
I was hoping that I could get some useful OS running, CPM would be great; I
have several CPM machines already, so it's not totally foreign to me. Would
I need a different CPU card, or other hardware to run CP/M? For that
matter, who ported the CPM to this architecture? I assume that the MDS
architecture is totally weird & proprietary...
If you look at the typical documentation that show how to do
a BIOS for CPM ( or is that BDOS, I get the two confused ), you'll
see that they have code for connecting to an Intel system. The
code should work on your machine, as I recall. The main issue
is that you'll most likely have to transfer things through a
serial port to the MDS. It's a pain but it can be done.
Dwight