A great piece of computer history!

I spent a couple of hours tonight getting software off my Simh emulator and onto my Kaypro.

First I did Vedit Plus, a terrific programmer's editor, and then z80  MASM, Aztec C, and Pascal MT+. All are working, with only a couple of minor problems.

Vedit was the biggest pain for me. For about an hour I couldn't figure out how to get it set up for a Kaypro.

read on for more...

I've had a breakthrough in preparing Kaypro 4 CP/M diskettes. In the end it was much simpler than I imagined it would be.

read on for more... 

As I've said elsewhere in the community, I really like CP/M. When I was using my first computer, a TRS-80 Model I, I really wanted to have a CP/M machine but couldn't afford one.

Now I can!

read on for more...

I spent some time this weekend on Simh in CP/M, trying out the BDS and Aztec C compilers. They both seem pretty good, but I think the Aztec compiler has more language features, including a more complete library and a full floating point library, which BDS lacks.

BDS compiles to a relocatable object file, and then links directly to a .COM file.

Aztec compiles to an ASM file, then assembles to a .O file, then links to a .COM file. A bit more work, but I use a submit file to do most of it for me anyway.

All in all, I think I like the Aztec compiler a bit better.

I also spent some time writing some simple UNIX-like tools:

• cat - prints a file to standard output
• more - pages a file to standard output
• cls - clears the screen and homes the cursor
• wc - counts lines, words, and characters in a text file

A couple of these (more and cls) were written using some vt100/ansi escape sequences, so would need some changes to work with another terminal. Not sure how I'd do a cls for a really dumb terminal.

Tonight I went and found an old getopt source distribution and compiled it with Aztec. It seemed to compile just fine to an object file, but I haven't tried to use it in a program yet. Maybe tomorrow night. It will be nice to be able to parse command line switches in some of these tools.

CP/M is turning out to be a lot of fun on the emulator. I have two emulated hard drives, and four 1MB floppies, so there's enough room there to do just about anything I want.

I forget almost everything I ever knew about CP/M assembly language programming, so it took me a while to figure out Z-80 assembler and CP/M system calls.

Read on for more...

I'm a big fan of CP/M.

The first computer I owned was a Radio Shack TRS-80, so while I did not own a CP/M system in its heyday, I did use it a fair amount over the years, and I use it still under Simh on the Altair emulator.

I have a ton of old CP/M stuff, including operating system images, programming languages, applications, games, and lots of documentation. This is my chance to share it all, and it will go up in the Documents section as I am able to upload.

-Tom