Z80 BigBoard ID Needed

From: Allison <ajp166_at_bellatlantic.net>
Date: Thu Mar 28 07:37:19 2002

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>

>There's plenty of CP/M software out there. All you need to do is find one
of
>the mirrors of the late Tim Olmstead's unofficial CP/M site.

There are several still up, The last location of Tim's site is back up.

>original MSDOS' EDLIN. The editor of choice for CP/M would probably be
>WordStar, of which there are several versions for CP/M. It does come with
an

If you can find VEDIT, that is a very powerful screen editor with TECO macro
from the command mode.

>Select the editor you want, keeping in mind that little of this stuff is
much
>use without a hard disk, which is not "rocket science" to add, provided you
>can snag a drive of the CP/M era. IDE drives are a mite more trouble, as
are
>SCSI types, but it's all been done. The maximum size for a CP/M 2.2 (plain

IDE offers the easiest of the lot to get and interface if the board was hard
disk
impared.

>vanilla version) system is 8 MB, and you can only have as many as 16
drives,
>including the floppies.

Thats per logical drive. A larger hard disk can be partitioned.
Or run one of the CP/M clones like P2DOS, ZRDOS, SUPRBDOS
as these have 32mb or higher logical disk limits.

>My understanding is that if you have a 60 MB drive,
>you can stick all the software that was ever published for CP/M, including
>sources, on it and still have room left. Some folks disagree, but I almost

I'd agree, actually most of the good must have stuff will fit easily on a 10
to 20mb drive with room to spare. The WC CP/M CDrom was I think under
100mb and that had whole libraries of several SIGs.

>believe that. Somebody sent me a CD of CP/M stuff that purportedly
contained
>pretty much "everything" there was, and it was barely 10% utilized.
Several
>CD's have been published, but most have what amounts to multiple copies of
the
>same stuff on them, so their capacity is not representative of what you
might
>need storage-wise.

The Walnut Creek cdrom is by far the most complete and maybe 10% utilized.
It's out of print but copies can be had. For serious CP/M users and
collectors
it's a must have along with the archivers used (ark, ARC, LHA, LBR...etal).


>Another thing to keep in mind is that the BigBoard runs at just over 2 MHz
>(2.5?). I've got several but really haven't considered how fast they run
in
>the original version, because I'm into hot-rodding. The software versions
I
>have don't use mode-2 interrupts, so one wonders why the designer used
those
>awkward Z80 peripherals that do little more than ensure that you can't run
the
>CPU faster than the peripherals, even though the CPU is quite capable of
it.
>Of course, the fact that the entire board is out of the Mostek and Zilog
>app-notes might explain that.

4mhz should be doable with minor effort. faster is as Dick said hampered
by the lack of suitably fast Z80 peripherals.

Allison
Received on Thu Mar 28 2002 - 07:37:19 GMT