toma@tekchips.UUCP (Tom Almy) (09/24/84)
I am/was interested in purchasing CP/M+ (the R.S. product) for a model II. None of the stores stock it and the "help" line from Fort Worth is of no assistance with my questions. Could anyone out there answer any of the following: 1. Does the bios support terminal emulation commands for "insert line" and "delete line" as well as the (to be expected) "cursor position" "delete to end of line" and "delete to end of screen". Does it emulate any real terminal; if so, which one. 2. What is the disk capacity? Can double sided drives be used? 3. Are the I/O vector words implemented (in other words, does the DEVICE command work?). Is the clock implemented? 4. What is the TPA value? I assume that only the non-banked CP/M is available, since the banked version would not work with the Model II's bank switching scheme (or am I wrong). I would also like to know the answers to questions 1 and 2 for Pickles and Trout V2.2 CP/M. I use FMG, and want to run an application program which requires insert line and delete line. Tom Almy (decvax|ucbvax| many others)!tektronix!tekchips!toma
res@ihuxn.UUCP (Rich Strebendt) (09/28/84)
In reply to: | I am/was interested in purchasing CP/M+ (the R.S. product) for | a model II. None of the stores stock it and the "help" line from Fort | Worth is of no assistance with my questions. Could anyone out there | answer any of the following: I also recently got CP/M for my Model II, but I gave up on the Radio Shack version in disgust and bought Aton CP/M 2.25 instead. I have been very well pleased with it. While it is a 2.2 version of CP/M, it incorporates a number of 3.0 features as well. Also, I have been pleased with the service I have gotten in answer to my questions. So, I will try to answer your questions FOR THE ATON VERSION instead. | 1. Does the bios support terminal emulation commands for "insert line" | and "delete line" as well as the (to be expected) "cursor position" | "delete to end of line" and "delete to end of screen". Does it | emulate any real terminal; if so, which one. The Aton CP/M supports these functions. I emulates both a SOROC and the VT-100 terminals, selected during system reconfiguration (which can be done any time at level1 <discussed below> and takes effect after a warm boot). | 2. What is the disk capacity? Can double sided drives be used? Aton has 600K per SSDD disk. Double sided drives are supported. Since I do not have any DSDD disks I cannot quote capacity figures off of the top of my head. As a side light, the formatter can format disks in several formats: Standard CP/M SSSD format (used for interchange of programs with other kinds of machines running CP/M) Aton SSDD format (the format I use except when exchanging software) Aton DSDD format (Alas, I have no double sided drives) Pickels and Trout SSDD format (not recommended by Aton for performance reasons, but provided for ease of interchange with machines running P&T) Radio Shack TRSDOS format (not too useful to me, but might be to others since the Aton formatter is lots faster than the TRS one). | 3. Are the I/O vector words implemented (in other words, does the DEVICE | command work?). Is the clock implemented? Sorry, am not familiar with the DEVICE command (I am still in the novice class). However, as nearly as I can tell, this is a very complete implementation of CP/M, so if that is a standard feature of CP/M I am fairly confident that it is implemented in this version. Aton CP/M maintains a clock display on the status line which can be set by command or by a device which plugs into one of the RS-232 ports, if that is what you meant by the second part of this question. | 4. What is the TPA value? I assume that only the non-banked CP/M is | available, since the banked version would not work with the Model II's | bank switching scheme (or am I wrong). Aton's CP/M does not add bank switched memory transparently to the TPA. However, if you have additional memory and are programming an application in assembler, you can do the bank switching without interference, or you can tell the CP/M OS to go find all of the extra memory it can and use some of it for disk track caches. The latter is invoked through the command "LEVEL2" and yields five track buffers in the 64K of extra memory I have, plus some that I can use by bank switching if I want to. In level2 the TPA is somewhat larger than in level1 since I/O buffers are moved to the extra memory. The effect of having disk track caches is to give the Model II with floppy drives a level of performance comparable to a system with hard disks for I/O intensive work (such as compilation). If you can find them, I strongly recommend a pair of articles that appeared in the two/sixteen magazine in the last couple of years. These articles compared the versions of CP/M for the Model II and 16 computers and did so in quite a bit of detail. The author was not as familiar with Aton CP/M as he was with P&T CP/M, so there is a small amount of bias there, but the articles are otherwise very good. This magazine is now named "Advanced Computing" but is still aimed at the users of Radio Shack Models II, 12, 16, 100, ... serious computers (as opposed to the Model I, III, 4, ... toys). If you have further questions about Aton CP/M I would be quite willing to try to answer them for you if you would send them to me by mail to the electronic address below. In the event that you cannot get through by electronic means, I have included my surface mail address as well. Rich Strebendt ...!ihnp4!ihuxn!res Room 2F-426 AT&T Bell Laboratories 1100 E. Naperville Rd. Naperville, IL 60566