mknox@UT-NGP.ARPA (mknox) (04/18/85)
The scheme you are using [not bringing in the CCP until the system is up] *should* work just fine. "There must be a bug there somewhere ..." [Big help, right?] Anyway, there is another scheme which CCS uses and might be of use to you. If you measure closely, CP/M-2.2 will fit in two tracks on a single sided, single density diskette *JUST BARELY*. I believe it has between 384 and 512 bytes left free, depending on bootstrap. What CCS does is put the system out there with an absolutely minimal BIOS, just big enough to force BDOS to run a program which reads in BIOS.SYS into a memory buffer, copy it up over the mini-bios, and exit with a cold or warm boot (as you choose). You don't need any disk write, fancy error checking, serial port, or printer support. You don't even HAVE to have a CON: driver. Obviously the system is loaded at an address which leaves room at the top of memory for the full size BIOS. An advantage over the CCP scheme is that is simplifies warm-starts after every ^C, the CCP and BDOS are in the system tracks where they belong. Another advantage (if you play with the BIOS like I do) is that all you have to do to test out a new BIOS is simply replace the BIOS.SYS file. No mucking with PUTSYS, GETSYS, or the like.