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Epson Geneva PX-8

Erik

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I purchased one of these recently and it arrived on Friday.

The machine is really very cool and I am very impressed that they implemented CP/M in ROM to support ROM software.

Has anyone else played with one? Is there a good source of other ROM software out there?

Erik
 
Re: Epson Geneva PX-8

"Erik" wrote in message:

> I purchased one of these recently and it arrived on Friday.

> The machine is really very cool and I am very impressed
> that they implemented CP/M in ROM to support ROM software.

The way I reading about it in:
http://old-computers.com/museum/
is, that it used Cartridges. I thought it might of been using
a variation/enhancement of CP/M-80 (with it being on
the ROM), but I not. However since the PX-8 I was looking
at was using a LCD display, I would say that it has been
modified to suit the hardware.

> Has anyone else played with one? Is there a good source of
> other ROM software out there?

It also states that the PX-8 is the successor of the PX-4, so
there might be some backward compatability there as well.

Cheers.
 
EPSON PX-8 documentation

EPSON PX-8 documentation

Sorry for the late reply, but I only recently discovered this forum.

At http://oldcomputers.dyndns.org/public/pub/RECHNER/EPSON/~fjkraan/comp/px8/doc/
is the User Manual in PDF.
There is no link yet to this directory, so you have to use the link above. I
scanned the pages and transferred them to PDF.
The site is owned by Fritz Chwolka.
Similar directories exist for the HX2- and PX-4.

BTW, the PX-8 came before the PX-4, not after...
 
The Geneva was a very cool machine with a few silly quirks. One was the mini-cassette drive that was, at first, the only way to save or load files. The drive was so slow you had to go have a cup of coffee just to save a text file a few pages long. If you have the wedge with the ram drive in it, however, you hardly ever have to use the cassette, since, if I remember right, the machine could keep the memory alive on battery trickle.

A few months after the Geneva was released Epson began selling an external 3.5" drive. This made all the difference in the world. If you want to play with the machine I heartily suggest you track down one of these drives so you'll have a solid bridge to software and other file i/o.

Oh... EPROMs were made with specific programs loaded into them, and I always had my core apps and utilities on them and swapped them when I needed to change my working environment.
 
"JFox" wrote in message:

> The Geneva was a very cool machine
> with a few silly quirks. One was the
> mini-cassette drive that was, at first,
> the only way to save or load files. The
> drive was so slow you had to go have
> a cup of coffee just to save a text file
> a few pages long. If you have the
> wedge with the ram drive in it, however,
> you hardly ever have to use the cassette,
> since, if I remember right, the machine
> could keep the memory alive on battery
> trickle.

> A few months after the Geneva was
> released Epson began selling an external
> 3.5" drive. This made all the difference
> in the world. If you want to play with the
> machine I heartily suggest you track
> down one of these drives so you'll have
> a solid bridge to software and other file
> i/o.

It's great when machines like that have strange
little quirks, because it inspires somebody else
to address those sorts of problems with
solutions of their own. For the Amstrad I guess
the 3" discs were the biggest quirk, they were
still nice disks & solid like 3.5" disks, but it
didn't stop others from designing 3.5", 5.25"
disk drives for our machine! ;-)

Cheers.
 
I have a PX8, had it for enough years to kill the nicads twice and I'm carful about those things. With the ramdisk wedge there are three sets of nicads,
one in the edge, and two in the main unit.

Mine came with the modem wedge, and the 120k ramdisk wedge. plus a good assortment of eprom software. Nice machine, slow though. I still use it.

Somewhere on the net and in my archive is software to build the bit pattern for eprom based files to use in it. Havent needed to do that for years. You also need a programmer to make up the eproms.


Allison
 
The only other commercial ROM I've come across so far is the DAKCOM communication program. (DAK, a reseller, distributed PX-8s for a while in the late 80s). Of course, there's also WordStar, Calc, BASIC & UTY ROMs, which may or may not have come with the machine, depending on when you bought it. I have a Multi-Unit for it, with DAKCOM v.1.1 (1986) module that I'll be putting up on eBay some time this week, unless someone here expresses an interest. The Multi-Unit is an expansion wedge that contains a 60K RAMDisk, a 300 baud direct-connect modem, and a third ROM socket. The internal battery pack is holding a good charge, and shows no sign of leakage.
BTW, for those of us who don't have the luxury of a real disk drive, there is a wonderful little DOS & OS/2 program called PX8VFS, also available for d/l from fjkraan's site here:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~fjkraan/comp/px8/px8vfs/index.html

This program works great, I use it all the time, and recomend it highly. (Really, I'd be almost lost without it).

--T
 
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