dwatola@NEXTASY2.EECS.WSU.EDU (David Watola) (10/30/90)
well, it has only been a few hours since i first posted an enquiry to see if anyone was interested in my Z80 emulator for UNIX (currently in the works). i have already received five affirmative responses. i will hang on to those email addresses... when i finally finish this thing (it really is close to being done right now, but i have three weeks from hell up ahead of me) i will probably just email the source to them (it doesn't look like it will be too large). i'll hang onto anyone else's address that asks as well... anyway, here is just a quick description as a teaser: i plan to support all documented Z80 code. eventually, i will add support for some of the undocumented opcodes (of course, this will be easily disabled) since i only use TRUE Z80As for hardware development (and i have a large stock of them in the closet). i have two versions in the works--one which is not extremely efficient, but has nice tight code and will be easy to understand. this is the one i will finish first. the other will be optimized (but still in C) for speed and will be pretty ugly---> mondo arrays of pointers to functions. as for cp/m support, it will be complete only in the sense that all of the standard bdos functions will be supported, as will the direct bios calls. however, it will not be possible to hook any of the bios calls (under the emulator). i don't have plans to neatly tie the cp/m filing system to unix--i was thinking of blocking out a large portion of disk memory (say, 1MB) and having it duplicate the track§or structure of my current machine. maybe provide a utility to move files between this 'disk' and unix--depends on how impatient i am. my main goal is simply to be able to run Turbo Pascal, MS Fortran, or Manx CII to generate ROMable Z80 code on my new NeXT. I see no reason why you should be able to hack up the bios to add extensions to CP/M -> this can all be done in the user interface. anyway, i'll document it all and it should be easy to modify... thanks for all the responses so far-> its good to know that a)CP/M is not dead and b)CP/M users do have enough sense to use bigger computers for bigger jobs.