Re: Speed of AE Z80plus ?

["Steven N. Hirsch" <shirsch@adelphia.net>]

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.

Steve