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DOS for KIM?

B

BobApplegate

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 23, 2004
Messages
117
Location
Medford, NJ
Was there ever a dominate DOS for the KIM-1? I couldn't afford drives back in the day, so never really paid attention to the few mass storage options out there except for cassettes.

I have one of my SD card systems talking to the KIM using the spare I/O ports, and an extended monitor that does SD disk directories, loads Intel hex files from SD files, etc. It's quite usable, but a real DOS would be better. Was there any out there that is available for use? If not, I might try to build something from scratch.

Bob
 
Hi Bob,

I've never heard of a DOS for the KIM-1 but I'd definitely be interested in yours if you decide to build something. :thumbsup:

Heather
 
BobApplegate said:
Was there ever a dominate DOS for the KIM-1? I couldn't afford drives back in the day, so never really paid attention to the few mass storage options out there except for cassettes.

I have one of my SD card systems talking to the KIM using the spare I/O ports, and an extended monitor that does SD disk directories, loads Intel hex files from SD files, etc. It's quite usable, but a real DOS would be better. Was there any out there that is available for use? If not, I might try to build something from scratch.

Bob
Click to expand...

I'm sure there were some out there, but I don't recall any getting to the point of being commonplace, let alone de facto standard.

I'm very interested in this SD card system, though! I still use your RS-232 card with my suitcase KIM.
 
The SD card is the same system I built for the 6800/6809 systems. On that RS-232 card is a 16 pin connector with the A and B ports from the KIM... I have a little adapter that allows the SD card parallel cable to plug in. My latest project is a version of the 60K RAM board that also has an 8K EPROM, and my extended KIM monitor in the EPROM has functions for doing a directory of the SD card, loading Intel hex files from it, etc. Pictures of it are still on the blog: http://www.corshamtech.com/

For the 6800/6809 systems I had FLEX, so all I had to do ("all you have to do...") was to write device drivers and then I had a real DOS running on those systems.

There were a couple disk systems for the KIM, I think one by HDE, and they had nice looking ads at the time ;-) FLEX has a simple enough file structure and adapts well to different disk geometries, so modeling it would be easier than going from scratch. Of course, I really need to find a BASIC interpreter with some sort of disk functions (even just SAVE and LOAD) to get an idea what they expect for DOS related functions.

Bob
 
It should work with any version, as I laid out that part of the board very early and haven't changed it. Someplace I've got an older board or two and can test it to be sure.

Bob
 
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