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CP/M & Contiki (from The Internet-enabled Contiki Desktop OS)





Dosius wrote:
Yves McDonald <""yves.mcdonald\"@NO SPAM sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:<JUrca.8479$VT.947854@news20.bellglobal.com>...

I studied how the Z80 softcard works many years ago and I think the 6502 was halted while the Z80 was working. The Apple' 6502 would 'wake up' to perform I/O and for short periods of time to refresh its registers which were built like dynamic RAM (needs refresh or it loses addresses for program counter and stack pointer!) In short, it was one processor at a time, plus they shared the same RAM.


Yes.  I tried to emulate one of these.


The memory map for the Z80 was all mixed up compared to the 6502 map to re-create the memory map of a CP/M system.


Really freaky. ;)  It was like 0000H->$1000, B000H->$D000,
E000H->$C000, F000H->$0000 or something like that.


CP/M wasn't offering much service: serial and disk I/O (through BDOS) and a return-to-OS system call. Since CP/M offers I/O, I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to make Contiki use them.


Bringing CP/M to the Internet age: what a mad concept! Just like riding a donkey on the freeway :).


Hey, I'd like to do some CP/M-86 hacking...I'm working on some
cross-compile hacks with Turbo C++ 1.01.  Ideas?  :D

Unfortunately not :(. I programmed for CP/M with K&R C then switched to various versions of Microsoft/ANSI C to do system programming under MS-DOS, and so on with Windows, etc.

Do you have an Apple 2 and a PC Transporter? That would be a nice target platform!

The idea of bringing Apple/CPM to the Internet keeps spinning in my head. I think I'll try it, basically as an exercise in OS and network programming. How about adding file support and a bare-bone FTP client? The Z80 has a nice architecture and so did CPM, with clean system call interface bouns. There's a 80 column display support too which is quite convenient for a text-based interface. I have to do an evaluation of the whole idea.