ACB.COR@OFFICE-1.ARPA (Alan Bomberger) (12/27/85)
I have this product (Write-Hand-Man) that has recently been converted to run on CP/M 3.0 (primarily for the C-128 market). I find that it fails to work on the Executive. Since I had trouble with the Vixen (another osborne creation tha was a non-standard CP/M 2 machine) I suspect the Executive is not a "simple" CP/M 3.0 machine. Can someone answer a few questions. What is the size of the Common Bank. What are the System Addresses (in both banks, BDOS and BIOS addresses, SCB address and the like) What are the first few instructions of the BDOS (in both banks) Is the BIOS jump vector "complete" allowing SELBNK calls from RSX's that happen to be in the common bank (see question 1). WHM is an RSX that Reenters the BDOS and thus must reach inside and save Stacks and state variables in both banks before it reenters the BDOS. I had hoped that since CP/M 3.0 was even less alive than CP/M 2.2 (have you ever tried to get an unconfigured CP/M 3.0 system with all the manuals and source?) there would be few "custom versions". Leave it to osborne. Thanks for any help
Woodie@DOCKMASTER.ARPA (Paul E. Woodie) (12/31/85)
There was a recent request for memory-map type information on the
Osborne Executive. I have not had time to get all the information
requested, but I will provide some of it now and some later, as time
permits.
Bank 0: The lower part contains system space and the upper part
contains most of bios and bdos. The top part (4k, I think) is common to
all banks and is the normal way that the banks talk to each other.
Bank 1: This is the normal user-accessable bank, it contains the cpm 3
base page, the TPA, and the common area in the highest addresses.
0-0ffh: cpm 3 base page
100h-0f305h: TPA
0f306h-0f8ffh: p/o bios,bdos
The address of the warm start bios entry point in the jmp at 0000.
The address of the bdos entry point in the jmp at location 0005.
Banks 2-6: Empty at present
Bank 7: Contains video memory
Bank 8: Start-up ROM, function key definitions,etc
in the lowest part of memory.hamby@uahcs1.UUCP (01/03/86)
*** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE *** What ROM and Bios Revision levels do you have ? This makes MEGA-DIFFERENCE. Osborne originally messed with index registers in version 1.0 of the rom, and neglected to save the IX and IY registers on the stack in the bios. Too make a long story shorter, turbo pascal and others would not run on the machine, and many rumors spread about cpm3 being incompatible with 2.2 software. Well, a simple rsx (about 8 bytes) inserted in the system first will fix this trouble (First in, last out) and allow most software to run. Most since programs that modify cpm itself of course will not run at all. Perhaps this is what is happening with "Write-Hand-Man". Please reply if you want the rsx source code or find *any* technical errors in my account of index registers and the ozzy exec. Jason Hamby --- ihnp4!akgua!sb6!scbhq!uahcs1!hamby