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Best "starter" CP/M machine? (and looking for KAMAS outliner software)

I'm not sure I can offer anything better than what has already been mentioned. My first thought was that I can't think of any best "starter" CP/M systems. CP/M was my first operating system and I inherited it with my North Star Advantage. I had to learn it so I could use it for writing contracts and printing them to paper on a serial attached Smith Corona daisy wheel printer. I had no money for buying a new computer at the time so I learned to use the Advantage and CP/M.

But that was 35 years ago. Back then CP/M was still supported. I learned to connect the Advantage to the phone line and dialed up bulletin boards and got lots of help. I even upgraded the machine with a hard drive and the Z-system. These days, you'll have to be pretty technical to get started with CP/M on any actual old hardware. If you are very handy with repairing hardware then I concur with some of the other comments. Your idea about a Kaypro seems to me to be a good idea, or an Apple IIe or C128. There is a lot more support for those machines than something like the Advantage or some other old proprietary equipment. But if you are a hardware guy then one of those old proprietary machines could be a lot of fun.

Seaken
 
I have been wanting to get my Advantage out and see if it still works. But I am afraid it will blow up since it hasn't been turned on for about 20 years. So, to explore CP/M I decided to go with CP/M-86 on some of my old PC compatibles. I run CP/M-86 from floppy drives on a 286 AT clone with both 3.5" and 5.25" drives and have utilized 22-Disk to make use of the high density floppies. I also run CP/M-86 on an XT clone with dual 720k drives.

I have WordStar, SuperCalc and d:base, and other utilities and some games. I don't use the outline feature of WordStar but I do think that may be a viable substitute for you. It reminds me of using CP/M on my Advantage but it is a different operating system. There is much more software for CP/M-80 in the archives. But I have CRT monitors, (VGA on the AT and mono amber on the XT) and real clicky keyboards and real floppies, etc. It is a very similar experience. To run CP/M-86 your 5160 XT is perfect.

Seaken
 
So I have a nice PCB to be populated, sent by a nice VCF forum member. I have a friend, quite advanced hardware engineer, who will help me put it together.

Have been playing with WordStar under emulation and will play with it more to test the outliing function. I did find kamasoft.com , appears recently created as a website, with Adam Trent's email, the guy who created KAMAS, at the bottom of the page. Emailed but no response yet.

Thanks again for all your comments.
 
geowar1 said:
I’ve got about a dozen Z80 based CP/M systems (SBCs, S100, RC2014, etc.)… but lately I’ve been playing with a tiny eZ80 based CP/M system: Agon light. It’s blazingly fast (18.434 MHz). The developer is working on a faster version called the Agon Heavy that will be 50 MHz!
Click to expand...

Hi there.

I’m an old geezer. In the 70ties and 80ties I was busy with CP/M. I had Kaypro’s, Intertec Superbrains, Bondwells. even used 8 inch floppies!! Loved it.
But old love never dies, so these days I am still playing with CP/M using emulators or running CP/M within VMware on Macs.

Recently I see these good old Z80 boards coming on the market, and I was delighted to see the Agon Light 2. It made my heart beat faster ❤️.

And just the other day I noticed your post in this forum, where you mention that the designer (aka Bernardo Kastrup) is working on the next generation: the Agon Heavy, that will have a 50Mhz eZ80.

Where did you read about it?
Any info on that?

So, I will patiently wait for the Agon Heavy.

Best

Robbert TA/PA3BKL
The dutch guy, living (it up) in Istanbul, Turkey 🇹🇷
 
As the developer of the MinZ series (MinZ, MinZ-C, Min-eZ & eZ-Tiny), I originally chose to let this thread play out with comments from others. While it will be good for the community if an Agon Heavy is released, I'll make a few points:

1) I choose to not include VGA/KBD in my designs since my desks are already crowded enough without adding another monitor / keyboard or wiring to my KVM. Terminal emulation works well and makes use of existing PC hardware. Likewise, I use a single USB cord to supply both power and two serial port connections.

2) I disagree with the Agon Light's repeated claims of "The fastest and cheapest 8-bit microcomputer ever made, by a large margin.". Perhaps the two adjectives combined may have some merit but the Min-eZ was available much earlier with all the features of the eZ80F91 at 50 Mhz rather than the Agon Light's more limited F92 variant at 18.432 MHz.

3) I use CP/M 2.2 as the base software. Users who want to work with CP/M-3, MP/M or other system can use this base as a loader that utilizes a standard file system and utilities.

As to the title of this thread ... the best starter CP/M machine is a bit vague as it depends on what the objective is, whether it's for running CP/M applications, software development, hardware development, etc. etc. Each of them probably has it's own set of "best" systems.
 
Would you be interested in building a small SBC yourself? The attached photo is of my Z80 CP/M homebrew computer. It can be powered off of the USB console port. It has sixteen 8 MB "drives" on a compact flash module. It runs CP/M at 20 MHz, and has two serial ports running at 115.2k baud. All the discrete components are easily obtained. The Zilog Z84C4010 (it's a CMOS SIO/0) is a little hard to find, but last I looked UtSource has them. If you aren't terribly interested in the higher clocks, any easily obtained Z80 DART or SIO/0 chip would work at say 10 MHz.

Roger
 

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There are couple glueless Z80 SBC that are easy to build and parts are available from China. I understand the parts are used, but they seem reliable and definitely cheap.

builderpages:plasmo:simple80 [RetroBrew Computers Wiki]

www.retrobrewcomputers.org www.retrobrewcomputers.org

builderpages:plasmo:eazy80:eazy80r1pcb:eazy80r1home [RetroBrew Computers Wiki]

www.retrobrewcomputers.org www.retrobrewcomputers.org
www.ebay.com

Simple80 Z80 CPU/SIO Homebrew IC Kit | eBay

Other Rules We will be good.
www.ebay.com
www.ebay.com

Eazy80 Z80 Homebrew IC Kit | eBay

Other Rules We will be good.
www.ebay.com
 
MrImprovement said:
In my reading I came across the KAMAS outliner software, but I haven't been able to find a working copy - does anyone know anything about this outliner program?
Click to expand...

I did founs the following "KAMAS" at the page (not as an archive - only 12 single files) :
(search on the page for KAMAS)

But I dont know if it does work correctly - under RunCPM on the RPi Pico I do get the following Startup-/Error-Message:

KAMAS.jpg
 

Attachments

guidol said:
I did founs the following "KAMAS" at the page (not as an archive - only 12 single files) :
(search on the page for KAMAS)

But I dont know if it does work correctly - under RunCPM on the RPi Pico I do get the following Startup-/Error-Message:

View attachment 1277021
Click to expand...
Thank you for that, I will give it a shot and have downloaded it. I know that KAMAS was based on Forth, so it seems that possibly there is a sample or startup file it is looking for. ABEND = "abnormal end", TCEMPTY maybe means "table of contents empty" ?
 
Yet another small SBC with "everything on it" is the Z80-MBC2 (GitHub repo). It uses an ATmega32A for all the I/O and almost all the glue logic, so it's very simple to build; boards, kits and probably even fully built units are available from various on-line sellers. It's got several different "operating systems" built into it, including CP/M 2.2, and uses SD cards for storage. There's also a terminal board available for it if you want to use a keyboard and VGA monitor rather than just connecting to it via a serial terminal program on another computer.

The main disadvantage of systems like this is that they're not very expandable. The board doesn't bring out the system bus, and the address space decoding is such that you couldn't really add anything to it anyway (though I suppose you could update the microcontroller software to create new emulated devices). So you're limited to what it has on-board, though that does include a serial interface, a real-time clock, 16 lines of GPIO, and so on. If you're happy with it, it seems like a pretty good system that's very easy to to build (or buy) and use. (And it's also fairly cheap; I think mine cost me about $40 or so.)
 
Plasmo said:
There are couple glueless Z80 SBC that are easy to build and parts are available from China. I understand the parts are used, but they seem reliable and definitely cheap.

builderpages:plasmo:simple80 [RetroBrew Computers Wiki]

www.retrobrewcomputers.org www.retrobrewcomputers.org

builderpages:plasmo:eazy80:eazy80r1pcb:eazy80r1home [RetroBrew Computers Wiki]

www.retrobrewcomputers.org www.retrobrewcomputers.org
www.ebay.com

Simple80 Z80 CPU/SIO Homebrew IC Kit | eBay

Other Rules We will be good.
www.ebay.com
www.ebay.com

Eazy80 Z80 Homebrew IC Kit | eBay

Other Rules We will be good.
www.ebay.com
Click to expand...
it is REALLY worth pointing out that IF YOU WANT TO BUILD A Z80 SBC THE PARTS ARE AVAILABLE NEW. I have no problem ordering from china but some of the biggest frustrations I've had in building is buying parts from there that don't work for whatever reason. The entire Z80 set of chips that are needed for building a system can be purchased new from US and European sources, they still make them!
 
New parts are obviously the safest approach but working with used, often obsoleted parts is part of the retro ethos. More often than not, it is a mixture of old and new parts.
 
My first (recent anyway) starter Z-80 CP/M machine was a kit from CPUville (http://www.cpuville.com/index.html). Came with all the parts, on one board, with great instructions, and it just works. I fanned out the 40 pin bus interface to connect it to a STD bus to add a printer board, additional serial ports, and a RAMdrive. I still use it today.
 
Some of the factors related to new versus used chips should be based on the experience of the builder, the availability of testing tools and the complexity of the devices. Used parts may be cheaper but some issues can take a lot of time and work to determine whether it's a device failure versus a bad solder joint.

With disclosure, some of the kits I sell contain used parts such as those that are no longer produced. However, every such device has been personally tested and verified to work at full speed. I've bought at least a half dozen used processors that failed my tests in various ways and were sent to the garbage.

My experience is that there are getting to be more problems with the used chip market, especially the more expensive devices. The used cost of a CPLD I use has soared from ~$6 to ~$20 in under a year and the failure rate has increased. That same Chinese SOURCE sent a batch of Z8S180 chips marked SL1960 (i.e. limited capabilities) but testing indicated they were not that device. In emails, they implied that their devices may be incorrectly remarked, and I now have to question all other markings such as the speed rating.
 
I've stuffed an i80 (not Z80) emulator into an Atmega8515 should have used an Atmega162, with external SRAM and SD card. Easy to build on perfboard, runs at an appropriate speed (approx. i8080 @ 2 MHz) and is reasonably extensible. It's enough to scratch the CP/M itch and (in contrast to many other SBCs) actually feels like using a retro system.

I do like my ZETA-V2 running RomWBW too, but it doesn't feel the same.
 
Same here. I based my system on CP/mega88 by Takashi Toyoshima, (also an i8080 emulator) but turned it into an Z80 emulator with several more modifications. It is now running in an ATMega 168 @ 20 MHz. it boots CP/M 2.2, CP/M 3.1, Dos+, ZCPR2/ZSDOS and ZPM. The apparent speed is something like 1.6 MHz. You can find the beans on it here:

builderpages:rhkoolstar:start [RetroBrew Computers Wiki]

www.retrobrewcomputers.org www.retrobrewcomputers.org
Look for version 1.22
 
geowar1 said:
I’ve got about a dozen Z80 based CP/M systems (SBCs, S100, RC2014, etc.)… but lately I’ve been playing with a tiny eZ80 based CP/M system: Agon light. It’s blazingly fast (18.434 MHz). The developer is working on a faster version called the Agon Heavy that will be 50 MHz!
Click to expand...
Hi there!

Your sentence 'The developer is working on a faster version called the Agon Heavy that will be 50 MHz!' really hit me.
I have a AGON LIGHT2 and I absolutely LOVE it.

But my question is:
WHERE did you read/hear about the AGON HEAVY (50Mhz CPU) project?

Would be thrilled to get more info about it from you.

Cheers!!

Robbert
 
kaypros are fun and reasonably interesting machines, with the bonus that they're very common and relatively cheap. i see good ones on ebay going for $250 or less regularly and i was able to get a 2 and a 2x from a local guy for only $300, definitely not a bad choice
 
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