bjf@utcsstat.UUCP (Bruce Freeman) (03/26/84)
I recently bought the Z80 CPM cartridge for the 64 because the price was
certainly right (very cheap!) and I figured it would be nice to have some
sort of operating system on my 64. The good news is that it *is* CP/M. You
get all those wonderful utilities such as ASM, DDT and what must be the
world's worst editor ED. I have had quite a bit of fun playing with it
and I get to step back into time to when operating systems were dumb and
simple. (It is a shock to go from UNIX at work to CP/M at home). The bad
news is that it has the usual atrocious Commodore documentation. The
manual has misprints and claims to contain stuff it doesn't.
For my money I got one Z80 cartridge, one (1) disk containing CP/M, and
one "manual". The "manual" claims that the source code to the BIOS is
contained on one of the disks you get. One? I only got one disk and the BIOS
source is certainly not on it. I did get the source to the DUMP program on
the disk but I'd much rather have the BIOS source. The Z80 BIOS source is
given in the "manual" but there are several typos in the listing which
make it suspect as far as I'm concerned. Another problem is that CP/M uses
the 6510 to do I/O. This means that you really get two BIOS programs, one
for the Z80, the other for the 6510. This is according to the "manual"
which starts getting hazy at this point about how things work. However
there is no 6510 code anywhere in the book. None for the 6510 BIOS and
certainly none for the mysterious 65BOOT program.
To anyone else out there with CP/M what can be done about this? Was
I really supposed to get more than one disk? Is there source available
for the BIOS? My fondest wish is to obtain a Hayes 1200 baud modem and
use it with CP/M on my 64. According to the manual this requires me to
write 6510 assembler to control the modem, get data out of a shared
memory area with the Z80, write Z80 code to handle the CP/M
side and then switch back and forth between the two processors. The
switching back and forth is documented in the manual but I think I'm
going to need some BIOS source if I ever want this to work. The manual
does give the source to a Xerox send/receive program with not a clue
anywhere as to why it is there as it is not on the disk.
In summary this seems to be the usual sloppy Commodore product. Good
price and maybe something can be done with it but the documentation is
lousy. I need to get a download program working over a modem because
there is very little software in the 64 disk format available. I have
heard that Turbo Pascal is available in 64 format but this is unsubstantiated.
Hope this helps anyone else in the same boat and maybe someone out there
knows some of the answers.
--
Bruce Freeman University of Toronto {decvax|harpo|floyd}!utcsstat!bjf