Rocksolid Light

Welcome to novaBBS (click a section below)

mail  files  register  newsreader  groups  login

Message-ID:  

AUTHOR FvwmAuto just appeared one day, nobody knows how. -- FvwmAuto(1x)


devel / comp.os.cpm / Modified Altair Lifeboat CPM 2.2 for disk-over-serial

SubjectAuthor
o Modified Altair Lifeboat CPM 2.2 for disk-over-serialDon Barber

1
Modified Altair Lifeboat CPM 2.2 for disk-over-serial

<1ccc7716-4676-4445-abeb-26f5f787b8b5n@googlegroups.com>

 copy mid

https://www.novabbs.com/devel/article-flat.php?id=3430&group=comp.os.cpm#3430

 copy link   Newsgroups: comp.os.cpm
X-Received: by 2002:ac8:590c:0:b0:2f3:e1b7:5d1d with SMTP id 12-20020ac8590c000000b002f3e1b75d1dmr2231049qty.191.1652923547645;
Wed, 18 May 2022 18:25:47 -0700 (PDT)
X-Received: by 2002:a05:6871:14b:b0:f1:ddb2:dd2a with SMTP id
z11-20020a056871014b00b000f1ddb2dd2amr1790483oab.299.1652923547327; Wed, 18
May 2022 18:25:47 -0700 (PDT)
Path: i2pn2.org!i2pn.org!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feed1.usenet.blueworldhosting.com!peer02.iad!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!news-out.google.com!nntp.google.com!postnews.google.com!google-groups.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail
Newsgroups: comp.os.cpm
Date: Wed, 18 May 2022 18:25:47 -0700 (PDT)
Injection-Info: google-groups.googlegroups.com; posting-host=100.36.72.37; posting-account=uFWFGgoAAAAg-T07vKS6-WrLOLJxcBj3
NNTP-Posting-Host: 100.36.72.37
User-Agent: G2/1.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: <1ccc7716-4676-4445-abeb-26f5f787b8b5n@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Modified Altair Lifeboat CPM 2.2 for disk-over-serial
From: don.bar...@gmail.com (Don Barber)
Injection-Date: Thu, 19 May 2022 01:25:47 +0000
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Received-Bytes: 2730
 by: Don Barber - Thu, 19 May 2022 01:25 UTC

Hi folks, just got to a good spot with my latest project and thought I'd share. I shared this on the s100computers group recently but thought comp.os.cpm might appreciate it too.

I've recently soldered up an Altair 8800c using a repro CPU card, Mike Douglas's 8800c case and front panel, and the s100computers.com Serial IO and RAM+ROM cards (including some modifications to get the latter working with front panel deposits). Once the Altair was running great I wanted to play with CPM, but I didn't want to set about building or acquiring floppy drives and disks.

So I modified Lifeboat CPM 2.2 and wrote a python script to exchange drive data over serial, making the PC into a virtual floppy drive. Its working well so I thought I'd share.

Please note this idea isn't really new. There is already APE and the FDC+ which both do similar. But I don't have the FDC+ card and I wanted something running on Linux...and it was a fun challenge in its own right.

Also, this shares the console and the disk data over the same serial connection. Basically a 0xFF is sent to trigger a command sequence when disk access is performed, which the PC side intercepts and exchanges the correct info, otherwise anything else sent over serial is passed to the terminal.

Please find the code and some prebuilt binaries at https://github.com/barberd/altair-cpm-serialdisk.

Right now its coded to use the Serial IO card USB module, but it would be trivial to modify the asm files to use other serial cards like the MITS SIO/2SIO cards. Would welcome pull requests for such.

Hope its helpful to someone...or at least interesting.

Don

1
server_pubkey.txt

rocksolid light 0.9.7
clearnet tor