A Z80/CPM VM - Some Fun with MYZ80 / DOSBOX / DROPBOX / DEBIAN / VMWARE

[jjandersoj]

Hi Folks,

By profession I am a Virtualization/Storage Engineer. I wanted to know if I could bring a usable "CPM/Z80 VM" to life with layered Modern Technology.

It's a bit of a "Dagwood Sandwich", but Bottom to Top, here is the software stack:

- MacBook Pro
- VMWare Fusion 10
- Debian 9 Virtual Machine (open-vm-tools installed)
- Dropbox installed in Debian VM
- DosBox installed in Debian VM
- MYZ80 Emulator 1.24 in DOSBOX

I used the internal VNC of VMWARE Fusion to give me direct access to the "Console".

MYZ80 has a great feature of IMPORT/EXPORT commands to interact with file exchange on DOSBox>Debian FS.

I autostart / turnkey all the layers at boot so it lands right at the A0: CPM Prompt Full Screen!

A VNC Client connect and Presto modern access to Retro 80's CPM 2.2.

File Exchange is super easy, Drop my CPM File in Dropbox IMPORT/EXPORT Folder, it gets delivered to the MYZ80 VM.

Then I use a MYZ80 IMPORT/EXPORT command to pick up the file from the DOSBox Layer.

It was a fun project over the last few days.

And in the end, I have a very usable "Virtual Z80" with remote access! WOOT!

Even with all the software layers, the speed exceeds the real Z80 hardware of the day.

If you have questions, I'll respond as I can.

Cheers,

jjandersoj (John-A)

 

[Chuck(G)]

I still run 22nice under dosemu on Ubuntu. Works fine and integrates with the ext4 filesystem nicely.

 

[Elminster]

Interesting how big do these image come out at? I containerised all (most) of the Acorn 8bit Emulators with Docker. I setup Jenkins to pull the source from GitHub, build it and shove the container into Docker Hub. Also requires VNC to connect, and not got round to sorting out the sound.

If anyone is interested the blog post are here https://elminster.github.io/blog/

 

[tezza]

Interesting. I've got MYZ80 (apparently) working just fine under MS-DOS with VirtualBox also. I say apparently because I haven't tested it thoroughly. It seems to import and export ok though.

Tez