haar%gmr.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA (Bob Haar) (02/26/86)
Hi,
I am considering getting ZCPR and ZRDOS for my CP/M system and have a
couple of questions that are not answered in Echelon's literature. If
there are some knowledgable ZCPRers out there who can enlighten me,
I would appreciate it. Responses can be sent directly to me at either
HAAR.GMR@CSNET-RELAY on ARPANET or HAAR@GMR on CSNET. Thanks in advance.
I am currently running banked CP/M 3.0 on a S-100 bus system with a
Tarbell CPU card and 192K RAM. Mainly, I would to maintain the
extensions of CP/M 3.0 and still get the advantages of Z-system (e.g.
aliases, named directories, term caps).
1) Does ZCPR have an analog to RSX's ? i.e. loadable, memory resident
system extensions?
2) Can ZRDOS take advantage extra memory for disk caching, RAM disk,
etc.? I am hooked on having the large TPA (60K) available under
banked CP/M 3.0 .
3) Do all CP/M 2.0 BDOS and BIOS calls act the same way under ZRDOS?
4) Is it possible to have porgrams such as Wordstar use the TCAP
terminal definitions.
5) I have heard that there is a multi-tasking version in the works
for the Hitachi HD64180 microprocessor. The Tarbell Z80 CPU card
that I use has a memory mapping scheme that is very similar to that
in the HD64180 - it individually maps each 4K segment of the 64K
memory space into the larger 24-bit extended address space. Would
it be reasonable to adapt the multi-tasking Z-system for this kind
of system ? ( I have had quite a bit of experience hacking CP/M BIOS
code in assembly language.)
I would also be interested in hear comments from anyone who has made
the transition from CP/M 3.0 to Z-system.
Thanks for any advice or information you can give.
Robert Haar
G.M. Research Labs
(of course, all the above applies to my personal system
and has nothing to do with official G.M. - they are
unlikely to even understand what I said.)