david-given

8 ms·

31.
by david-given 7y ago
So they were. That explains why the only compilers on their web site are Microchip ones... oh well, worth an email to them asking what happened; maybe they'd be willing to open source the CP/M compiler!
32.
by david-given 7y ago
Those are _good_ days.
33.
by david-given 7y ago
Fuzix is amazing. I did a port to the MSP430, a Texas Instruments single-board computer with 66kB of RAM; it feels just like a Unix, despite having no MMU and no multitasking... http://cowlark.com/2015-10-27-fuzix I find CP
34.
by david-given 7y ago
Thanks very much! But someone else worked out the maths and the base kernel --- I just did the implementation (and loads of other people chimed in on microoptimisations). I _do_ think it may be the fastest 8-bit Mandelbrot in the world, alt
35.
by david-given 7y ago
There are a couple of short (a few seconds only) edits where I just zoned out thinking about something, but the big breaks are clearly labelled. Also, check out the clock at the bottom right corner! I started this at about 14:00 and finishe
36.
by david-given 7y ago
The 8086 could move memory _way_ faster than the 8080 could! Also the ACK's memmove/memcpy is truly dreadful. I need to replace it with hand-tooled assembler ASAP. It's tougher than it looks, though; the 8080 only has two reg
37.
by david-given 7y ago
There are plenty of CP/M C compilers (I'm planning on including BDS C into cpmish at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDS_C It's written in hand-tooled assembly!) but with the exception of Hitec
38.
by david-given 7y ago
Hello, author here. Eeeaggh. Yes, this took a while. I started after lunch and finished sometime after midnight (look at the clock in the bottom right hand corner of the screen). I'm still kicking myself at some of the dead ends I went
39.
by david-given 7y ago
I've been using them since at least 2002 --- but that was a service migration at their end, so the actual time would be longer than that. I hear gandi.net's DNS is good.
40.
by david-given 7y ago
Don't forget the five minute wait to update your cookie preferences before you can interact with their website. That's a nice usability touch.
41.
by david-given 7y ago
I found ae; later versions build but they're kinda big (45kB, yikes), and while the unobfuscated early version is amazingly simple it handles redraw by refreshing the entire screen on each keypress. If you've got curses that'
42.
by david-given 7y ago
Russell's BASIC is supposed to be as close as possible a copy of the BBC Second Processor system BASIC, which was v4 (v1 was the rather buggy version in the 1981 Model A, v2 the bugfixed 1982 Model B, v3... don't know, probably th
43.
by david-given 7y ago
ZCPR2 has a no-commercial-use license encumbrance, while ZCPR1 is genuinely public domain.
44.
by david-given 7y ago
I haven't seen ae. I'll take a look. Fuzix has some decent software, too, including a stub curses, which may be useful. Thanks! Re ZCPR2: licensing. It's got a no-commercial-use license encumbrance which ZCPR1 doesn't ha
45.
by david-given 7y ago
Was it ever open sourced? I can't find a reference.
46.
by david-given 7y ago
Nope. CP/M was _not_ GPLd. Instead it got a custom license from Lineo which explicitly allows for it to be distributed by one site, and one site only: http://www.gaby.de/cpm/license.html It's a fascinating hi
47.
by david-given 7y ago
Apparently Stevie can be made to work on CP/M but there's claims it's too slow for real use. See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.cpm/lfuEr0hR... . Thanks for the suggestion, thou
48.
by david-given 7y ago
CP/M is modular and incredibly low in requirements. You don't even need interrupts. All you need is more than about 16kB of RAM, mapped at 0x0000, and enough hardware for a console and disk. (Obviously the more the better. You won
49.
by david-given 7y ago
Oh, huh. I thought it was more heavyweight than that. I'll go take a look. Sadly I don't know enough about FPGAs to know whether the Artix-7 is particularly big or not. But you know what would be _really_ cool, though? If your Z80
50.
by david-given 7y ago
I have an Epson PX-8 (with integrated microcassette drive!). It's terrible, but in a completely awesome way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3MARL-F8NI
51.
by david-given 7y ago
I've never touched CP/NET or MP/M, but I've read up a bit on them, and on CP/M 3 which shares a number of features --- I have to say that I'm not really a fan of it; there's a lot of extra complexity for a
52.
by david-given 7y ago
Hello, author here. The big missing bit so far is a text editor --- I haven't found an open source one which will work with my tools yet. (I have found te, which is GPLd, but I need to do some C compiler work first. CP/M is hell o
53.
by david-given 7y ago
Oh, yeah --- I'm not complaining about Z80 being obsolete. I'm complaining that it's too new! CP/M proper uses 8080 machine code, which Z80 code is almost (but not quite) backwards compatible with. So Z80 machines can ru
54.
by david-given 7y ago
Probably --- CP/M is disturbingly flexible. Whether it'd be useful I don't know. Hardware-wise, you need 16kB or up RAM, preferably starting at 0x0000; a different base address means you won't be able to run standard bin
55.
by david-given 7y ago
Z80 and 8080 only --- I would like it to be 8080 only but I haven't been able to source an 8080 CP/M kernel and shell which are provably open source. So instead I'm using ZSDOS kernel (GPL) and the ZCPR1 shell (PD). Fun fact:
56.
by david-given 7y ago
Re copyright contamination: that's pretty doubtful, actually. While it's not a clean room reimplementation it does work quite differently, with a whole set of different bugs, syntactic wibbles and semantic quirks, as well as being
57.
by david-given 7y ago
ZILF works just fine. There's even a competition for games written in ZIL using it: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ZILcom/permalink/76701623374...
58.
by david-given 8y ago
My father had one of these back in the day for the BBC Micro. I remember struggling with painfully slow screen dump routines (for printing an image of the screen onto paper) before someone had the insight that by printing the images sidewa
59.
by david-given 8y ago
Tao was a UK OS company that produced operating systems call Taos and int e nt (emphasis theirs); their killer feature was binary portability and assymetric multiprocessing, so you could have multiprocessor machines built of several differe
60.
by david-given 8y ago
GEOS would run on systems three orders of magnitude smaller than the ones you describe. It was intended to work well on machines with a single megabyte of RAM, and did. I have an Android ADP1 phone on my desk at work; the first Android ph

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