CP/M?

[BigBill]

Will this thing be able to run CP/M from an SD card as if it were a disk?

[vbriel]

Hi Bill,

Not at this time, I've used all the "cogs" in the microcontroller that handles the I/O. I may look into something in the future, but if you want a single board cpm/m machine, Andrew Lynch makes the N8VEM and it is a great board.

Vince

[www_z80_eu]

I would *really* appreciate this, running CP/M on it, preferably started from the SD card of course
What is the challenge here (if the "main" hardware is already emulated, depends this from emulating the floppy disk controller ... ?) ?

May be it will be an idea to look at the (x86) sources at http://www.schorn.ch/cpm/intro.php ( sources : http://www.schorn.ch/cpm/zip/altairz80source.zip ).
This one does emulate several floppy disk controllers (and they use the original boot rom content for maximum compatibility...).

Regards
Peter

- P.S.: I will repeatingly look at the project and will continue to feed my blog at http://www.z80.eu/blog )

[marktuson]

I just posted a thread asking this question Deleted it now I've actually read the list of topics.

I would be very tempted to get one if CP/M ran on it. I got really into Ancient UNIX after some severe disappointments in the beta collecting scene, and in so doing forgot my roots as a CP/M enthusiast: back when I had a 486 ThinkPad (the one with 3M of core and a 120M disk) I used to run CP/M through MyZ80. A while later I discovered SIMH... then I got into UNIX, and now I find I can program a simulated PDP-11 in pre-K&R C, but I yearn for CP/M, once more.

So please get CP/M working. I'll be very likely to get one, then. Only thing is I'll be replacing the SD interface with an SD-to-IDE converter, and maybe using an old hard drive in it - I've got millions of ten-year-old drives lying around here.

[brianvacha]

This might be a version of CP/M that will help with getting it on the Altair 8800 micro. It is for the Epson PX-8 Geneva a portable that runs CP/M out of ROM.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~fjkraan/comp/px8/OSRM03.html


http://www.xs4all.nl/~fjkraan/comp/px8/

[vbriel]

CP/M is on the drawing board. We are looking at one of two ways to do this. One is to use a RAM drive add-on board to load an image into. It would battery backed so you wouldn't have to load it in all the time. The other option is a new driver for the SD card. There is a driver out there that will allow random access to files so we can pick a read/write point. Don't know if this will work, but it's worth looking into.

[hsnewman]

Will the new board(s) be compatible with this version of the Altair 8800 micro?

[Fox]

Is there any news on this? I'd really love to get CP/M running on my Altair micro.

[vbriel]

Since the data rate on the SD storage card in the terminal section to the CPU would be too slow as a data storage device, I decided to create a RAM drive card that will act as a duel disk drive. It will be battery backed so you won't have to reload a disk image every time you power up. Instead of loading BASIC, you will load a bootloader for CP/M and start and be on your way. I have a design layout for the RAM drive and extra 32K (62K required for CP/M) but want to add a clock chip to the circuit so CP/M will keep proper time stamps on the files.

To be honest, since my move I haven't had any time to do any design work but that will change starting next week. It takes a while to design a board, test it and work out the bugs but I would like to have something by this summer.

Vince

[Bob]

Cool!!

[galaga]

I decided to create a RAM drive card that will act as a duel disk drive.

why not use CF in memory mode??

are you going to add a space for a speak-jet and LM386 "1w" amp??

also how hard would it be for pin 12(on the8515) as an irq for the i8080???

[vbriel]

I had not planned on the speakjet with the Altair, mostly because of what the Propeller can do with some hacking. Also, the price of the chip is a little high. I probably will discontinue the multi I/O board for the replica 1 that uses the speakjet in place of a Propeller chip that can do more. It has the ability to play .wav files and other sounds.

I don't want to do a CF card simply because it would be another card onboard and might confuse some people.

Ah yes, pin 12. The long story is that the initial plan was to have a battery back up RAM. With the SD card storage it was no longer needed and it was costly for the battery that I was going to use. So, I removed the battery circuit and didn't replace the VBAT (Voltage to BATtery) that was used to power the RAM chip. I could have used pin 12 as an INT pin but it never got wired. It will be for future revision boards.

The plan is to wire pin 12 up to the expansion bus and add an interrupt to the CPU. First I want to finish up the disk controller board that I'm right in the middle of.

Vince

[vbriel]

Work continues on the RAM drive. There are some bugs to work out but progress is being made. Garry has Disk basic working to read/write to/from the images and is working on getting images back off of the RAM drive onto the SD card.

Just so you guys have the most up to date information, CP/M boots to a prompt but disk access isn't working correctly yet. I have a design issue with the battery backup circuit I hope to fix this week. I just want everybody to know how much work Garry and Al have put into the Altair project.

I'll try and get some pictures up this week.

Vince

[galaga]

just been googleing found this site
http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html

hope its of value

matt

[vbriel]

Sneak Peek, nothing is ready yet, but I'd thought I would let you guys know that CP/M is working. There is still much left to do still but things are coming along.