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APE - To mimic: The Altair Peripheral Emulator

Bill_Loguidice said:
Very cool, though I wish he called it something other than APE, since that's been the long-time name of the superb Atari Peripheral Emulator for years and years.
Click to expand...

I dropped the owner a note to see if the exact file format and source is available. I would love to adapt this to use with my IMSAI and to get it to work properly with generic CP/M images (I assume it will work but I need to confirm).
 
An update...

I spoke to the author and he actually made a custom implementation for my IMSAI. I have the files and I hope to try to use it this weekend. Maybe at some point there will be embedded header information in the disk image (like used in Imagedisk or Teledisk) but for now the file format is essentally a straight sequential track-and-sector count.

The key here is that you need two operational serial ports -- one for the console and one for the disk server. I'm going to use two laptops but I guess there's no reason why one couldn't use a single computer if it had two serial ports, but I confess I don't have the docs with me right now.
 
I'd like to report back on my experiences getting APE working. It took me longer than it should because I had my serial card misconfigured. After I got that straightened out, it worked like a charm.

I used a single laptop running both HyperTerm and APE and connected to my IMSAI through two USB-to-serial adapters. I had made the IMSAI-side bootstrap program (about 20 bytes) into a HEX file so I can upload it to memory using my monitor. The bootstrap loads a secondary cold-start loader from the disk image and jumps to that. After that, it's CP/M. Yeah!

I haven't investigated all of the utilities and such, but it looks like a great program.
 
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