Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC (allison) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

2 Jan 2012

On 12/31/2011 01:43 AM, Josh Dersch wrote:
...
  Anyone have any recommendations for a reasonably
featured 8080 or Z80 
 BASIC?

 What I've got running at the moment is a mongrel IMSAI 8080 with a 
 Z80, 48K of working memory and a serial port.  My eventual goal is to 
 get CP/M running on it (I have a Cromemco 64FDC -- anyone know of 
 either an official CP/M for this or know of a BIOS that supports this 
 controller before I start writing my own?) but for the time being I 
 thought it would be fun to get a BASIC running on it.

If you have drives hooked up you will be able to run Cromemco CDOS with a
64-FDC and the obvious choices would be either Cromemco 16K Basic or 32K
Structured Basic (although 64K might be a better bet for that one).

You don't say what CPU board you have but I have run CDOS in an IMSAI with a
ZPU, 16-FDC and 64K and it runs nicely - lovely blinkenlights! Moving to
CP/M shouldn't be too hard but you will have to either find a pre-patched
one or integrate the IO and disk routines yourself and, catch 22, that needs
a working system to start with (chicken and egg of course).

If you do move to CP/M expect that the Cromemco Basic's won't work without
some patching as they typically use some CDOS calls not present in CP/M.

James