SAGE@LL.LL.MIT.EDU (08/15/90)
Dan Fandrich said, "I'd love to get ZCPR going on my machine, but without full BIOS sources that's next to impossible." Not so on several accounts! First, with NZCOM you can have a full Z- System running in a matter of minutes on just about any CP/M-2.2 computer, including the SuperBrain. There is no need to tinker with the BIOS at all. Second, if you are not willing to spend the money for NZCOM and you have MOVCPM for your machine, you can use it to create a version of CP/M with some free memory above the top of the BIOS (relocated downward). After that, it is not terribly difficult to patch the BIOS coldboot code to initialize the ZCPR buffers and to replace the CP/M CCP with ZCPR3x. You still won't have as flexible and configurable a system this way, but I did this many times before Joe Wright came up with the autoinstall concept used in NZCOM. Even if you don't have MOVCPM, there is still hope. As the owner of the QX-10 mentioned here recently (sorry, I did not note his name), you can fairly easily create your own simplified version of NZCOM for your particular installation. You would boot CP/M and then run your own loader program that would install the virtual BIOS some distance below the real BIOS entry point. I described this in some detail in a TCJ column about two years ago. -- Jay Sage