Re: Speed of AE Z80plus ?

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Steven N. Hirsch wrote:

>Moll wrote:
>
>> You know, that makes me wonder if a nearly all-native CP/M 2.2 BIOS 
>> could be written, that only uses the 6502 for drive access.
>
>Our CardZ180 board was heavily influenced by the PCPI Applicard (aka 
>Micropro Starcard), which offloaded most of the IO handling to the host 
>6502.  By means of some clever hardware and software tricks, we had an 
>80-column text driver capable of keeping up with the fastest modems of 
>the day (9600baud was considered blazing) for BBSing.
>
>The CardZ180 host support was actually a ProDOS SYSTEM file.  ProDOS 
>stayed resident during operation and gave us simple access to the native 
>filesystem. When you were done with the Z180, you just 'quit' back to 
>the BASIC.SYSTEM prompt.
>
>Rod Pederson wrote a nice little program in Turbo Modula-2 which acted 
>as a point-n-shoot file manager for moving data back and forth between 
>CP/M <---> ProDOS.  I think I may have added support for propagating 
>timestamps, too.
>
>It was ahead of its day.

I should say so, Steven!  I wish I had found one!

-michael

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