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> Porting a CP/M BIOS is a nice engineering and assembly language challenge for anyone willing to take it on, depending on their hardware environment. In my ca
by nineteen999 4y ago
> Porting a CP/M BIOS is a nice engineering and assembly language challenge for anyone willing to take it on, depending on their hardware environment.
In my case I decided the hardware environment was going to be hosted inside Unreal Engine:
https://i.imgur.com/5MDfwKg.png https://i.imgur.com/5MDfwKg.png
It's crazy easy to get CP/M running on just about anything with Z80 CPU emulation, and some glue logic to handle reading bytes from a keyboard I/O port, and sending them to a terminal, and reading/writing sectors from a block device. I had to write a VT100 emulator for UE4 but that doesn't take too much work.
WordStar:
https://i.imgur.com/rIY1he8.png https://i.imgur.com/rIY1he8.png
A telnet client (complete with ZMODEM) for accessing BBS's on the Internet:
https://i.imgur.com/aSc9VGL.png https://i.imgur.com/aSc9VGL.png
Zork I and Rogue:
https://i.imgur.com/gnOCp3e.png https://i.imgur.com/gnOCp3e.png
- cbm-vic-20 4y agoThis is great! Reminds me of Notch's post Minecraft game that never got off the ground, 0x10c.
- nineteen999 4y agoIt was very much inspired by that, yes.
- accrual 4y agoExtremely cool. It'd be fun to play with machines from this era in VR and have them exist with huge glass terminals like this. It makes them feel so immense compared to what they actually were (small tabletop computers).
- nineteen999 4y agoI'd love to go back and work on it more, I wanted to have both Z80/6502 based systems, just like the 8-bit wars of the 80's, but with networking. I couldn't decide between "1980's in space" or a post apocalyptic world where only 8-bit computers were robust enough to function. Maybe one day.
- kjs3 4y agoFor me, Turbo Pascal was always the killer app for CP/M, though Wordstar & VisiCalc are probably more important overall.
- fentonc 4y agoI still play around with Turbo Pascal on CP/M a lot for fun - it is a shockingly good development environment (even on a 4 MHz CPU my edit/compile/debug loop is usually <10 seconds, which is pretty fast even by modern standards). And it could all trivially fit in the L1 cache of a modern CPU.
- nineteen999 4y agoI haven't tested Turbo Pascal on it, since i'm not a Pascal programmer, but the HiTech-C compiler runs and creates working executables, its not a stretch that Turbo Pascal would either.
- kjs3 4y agoUmmm...why would there be any doubt Turbo Pascal can create working executables?
- nineteen999 4y agoWhy would there be an assumption I have implemented all the emulation completely and correctly enough for it to run? If it doesn't, there's a bug in my emulator, end of story. I have had to implement all kinds of things to make various software work correctly, and there's probably still more to do.
- kjs3 4y agoWhy would you assume I'm talking about your emulator. I just said I liked Turbo Pascal.
- nineteen999 4y ago