Take a look at the Zilog EZ-80 or Z84C15. The Z84C15 has everything you should need as far as peripherials. Just add FLASH and SRAM. Some of the high end PICs might be applicable, but personally, I can't stand the little buggers. Other choices might be the Atmel Mega128, or one of the TI MSP430s with dual UARTS. The difference is that while the Z84C15 has real UARTS with real handshaking lines (the venerable SIO core), all these other UARTS are basically 2 wires. You want handshaking, you'll have to manage all that yourself. Not rocket science, but it is extra code and hardware. The real problem is there are *way* too many choices in micros that will fit the bill for what you want to do. Start going less mainstream, you've got the ARM cores, SH/x series from Hitachi (verra nice parts), custom x86 cores, PowerPC, ST9 or ST10, yada yada yada. For projects with sensitive production costs, you can really get down there, but at the cost of going with questionable tools and suppliers. --John -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-admin(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Pat Finnegan Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2002 10:31 To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: Re: CP/M TCP/IP (was Re: CP/M coding question) [snip] Right now I'm looking at either a Z80 with 32k of ram, 16k of flash, a CTC and one or two DUARTS, or a uC that'll provide as much of that in hardware as possible. PICs are nice, but generally seem to have too little memory for TX/RX buffers, and Basic stamps are too slow. (and who wants to program in BASIC anyways?) Any suggestions on a good uC to use? -- Pat

Have you looked at the WatCom stack? Compilable with Borland (free, these days). I dunno if I'd rip the ROMs out of the machine, or just use a solid state IDE disk drive (read: Compact FLASH). Considering how cheap those are, it'd be a lot easier than generating ROM'able code. And you'd have a DOS environment to debug in. And actually, if you're going to do all that, just run the KA9Q or JNOS router stuff. --John -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-admin(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Tony Duell Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2002 16:55 To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: Re: CP/M TCP/IP (was Re: CP/M coding question) Not realy the same thing, but related... I've considered pulling the BIOS ROMs from an old XT or AT system (preferably IBM as I have the schematics...) and replacing them with some kind of TCP/IP stack. Stick an ISA ethernet card in one of the slots (or a serial card and use SLIP or PPP) and fill up the other slots with whatever I/O cards would be appropriate to connect to the CP/M box or whatever. Without the IBM BIOS getting in the way, the 8088 should have enough power for this, and without the BIOS there'd be no reason to have a video card or keyboard (or disk drives). Has anyone ever tried this, or anything like it? I really don't feel like writing all the code from scratch... -tony