essential CP/M files

From: Jim Battle <frustum_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Wed Sep 12 23:19:24 2001

Since somebody brought up the issue of CP/M, I have a question for the old
CP/M hands out there in classiccmp-land.


Short version:

If you were stuck on an island with a solar-powered CP/M machine and only
one floppy disk in CP/M 2.2 format, which programs and utilities would you
want on that disk?


Longer version:

I've been (slowly) adding support for emulating a double-density (dual
density, actually) northstar disk controller in my Sol emulator, Solace.

When I release this version of the emulator, I was wondering what disk
images to present with it. I know full well that I might be the only
person who will really use this, and a few dozen people may fire it up,
mess with it a bit, and that's all. Still, having spent so much time
developing it, I'd like to present a polished package.

There is, fortunately, a wealth of CP/M files still out there on the net,
but my goal isn't to collect them all and put them on my site. What I want
is to have some essential/useful general CP/M programs, then collect just
those that are specific to the Sol version of CP/M (or another S-100
machine using a VDM).

Any opinions of what I should distribute with the emulator? Here is what I
am planning on so far:

        STAT
        PIP
        ASM
        MAC
        DDT
        ED
        DUMP
        LOAD
        SUBMIT
        XSUB

This list was chosen simply because these are the standard
programs/utilities that D.R. shipped with CP/M 2.2 and are described in
their user's manual.

Unfortunately, I don't have FORMAT, MOVCPM, PUTSYS, GETSYS, or SYSGEN since
all this has been bootstrapped up off of the single floppy that was in my
machine when I got it, and that disk didn't include much of anything other
than the boot tracks. I could recreate them, but it would take some time
and it is time I'd rather spend in other ways. It probably doesn't matter
anyway since there is no good reason to SYSGEN as the emulator has only one
memory size.

Although there are lots of replacement programs for those listed above that
are undoubtedly better than the stock CP/M 2.2 programs, I am going to use
the originals from D.R. and leave it up to any user who cares enough to
customize it as they see fit.

I plan on adding one disk utility to allow making a sector-by-sector copy
of virtual disks so that new boot disks can be created. NSCOPY is the one
I use on my real Sol, so it is probably the one I will distribute with Solace.

As a reminder, the Sol uses an 8080, so I can't use a lot of the fancy
Z80-ified programs that are out there.

Thanks for any opinions you can share.
-----
Jim Battle == frustum_at_pacbell.net
Received on Wed Sep 12 2001 - 23:19:24 BST