smp
Veteran Member
Hello all,
Over the past year, I acquired a good working IMSAI chassis with front panel and 2 MHz 8080 processor board. I built the S-100 SIO Board designed and offered by the good folks over at S100Computers.com. I acquired a CompuPro RAM-17 board on eBay, and it also is working perfectly.
I also have taken the source code that was originally the IMSAI Self-Contained System, and stripped out the text editor and the assembler, leaving a small system monitor that can ENTR bytes into memory, DUMP memory to the screen, and EXEC starting at a given address.
Back in the spring, I purchased a Versafloppy II floppy disk interface card from Herb Johnson. Recently, now that I believe that I have a solid reliable 8080 system running, I added a BOOT command into my system monitor from code I scrounged up along the way. At present, I have the code load sector 00 into memory and then restart the monitor, rather than jump to the code it just loaded, for testing.
This past weekend, I dug out an old dual 8 inch drive box that I have had stored for the past decade or more, checked out the power supplies and attached the big old ribbon cable to my floppy interface card.
When I put an 8 inch disk into the drive, the BOOT command code lights the light on the disk drive, properly completes and restarts the monitor program without an error indication. When I take a look, the first 128 bytes of memory are now filled with 00H (this is not a CP/M disk, it's just an 8 inch data disk from somewhere).
All this progress! Now I need an actual CP/M disk...
I fully realize that there is no "standard" CP/M disk, and one must do a number of customizations to integrate CP/M with the actual system. I have all of the original DRI manuals, including the CP/M Alteration Guide that contains all the steps in the modification process, as well as all the exapmle code snippets that I will need to start with and expand upon. As well, I may be able to make use of Versafloppy code available from Herb Johnson's web site.
Since my system is completely my own, I know I cannot go out and find a "system disk" for it. However, I also have not been able to find anyone offering an 8 inch disk that replicates the original one that would have come in the CP/M 2.2 package.
Does anyone know where I can go to purchase a replica of the original CP/M 2.2 8 inch disk, so I can then follow the steps in the CP/M Alteration Guide and bring up my own system from scratch?
Any other advice?
Thanks, in advance, for your patience and response.
smp
Over the past year, I acquired a good working IMSAI chassis with front panel and 2 MHz 8080 processor board. I built the S-100 SIO Board designed and offered by the good folks over at S100Computers.com. I acquired a CompuPro RAM-17 board on eBay, and it also is working perfectly.
I also have taken the source code that was originally the IMSAI Self-Contained System, and stripped out the text editor and the assembler, leaving a small system monitor that can ENTR bytes into memory, DUMP memory to the screen, and EXEC starting at a given address.
Back in the spring, I purchased a Versafloppy II floppy disk interface card from Herb Johnson. Recently, now that I believe that I have a solid reliable 8080 system running, I added a BOOT command into my system monitor from code I scrounged up along the way. At present, I have the code load sector 00 into memory and then restart the monitor, rather than jump to the code it just loaded, for testing.
This past weekend, I dug out an old dual 8 inch drive box that I have had stored for the past decade or more, checked out the power supplies and attached the big old ribbon cable to my floppy interface card.
When I put an 8 inch disk into the drive, the BOOT command code lights the light on the disk drive, properly completes and restarts the monitor program without an error indication. When I take a look, the first 128 bytes of memory are now filled with 00H (this is not a CP/M disk, it's just an 8 inch data disk from somewhere).
All this progress! Now I need an actual CP/M disk...
I fully realize that there is no "standard" CP/M disk, and one must do a number of customizations to integrate CP/M with the actual system. I have all of the original DRI manuals, including the CP/M Alteration Guide that contains all the steps in the modification process, as well as all the exapmle code snippets that I will need to start with and expand upon. As well, I may be able to make use of Versafloppy code available from Herb Johnson's web site.
Since my system is completely my own, I know I cannot go out and find a "system disk" for it. However, I also have not been able to find anyone offering an 8 inch disk that replicates the original one that would have come in the CP/M 2.2 package.
Does anyone know where I can go to purchase a replica of the original CP/M 2.2 8 inch disk, so I can then follow the steps in the CP/M Alteration Guide and bring up my own system from scratch?
Any other advice?
Thanks, in advance, for your patience and response.
smp