[HN Gopher] Running CP/M on the C128
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Running CP/M on the C128
Author : celso
Score : 88 points
Date : 2024-03-04 10:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (celso.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (celso.io)
| toadi wrote:
| In my teens I actually ran CP/M on my C128 which could also be a
| C64(this mostly for games)
| pantulis wrote:
| I remember Commodore using the CP/M capability to position the
| C128 as a more serious C64.
| vidarh wrote:
| And it didn't work very well. It didn't sell much, CP/M was
| dying at that time and the CP/M support in the C128 was not
| great. "Half my class" at school had C64's, but I only ever
| knew one person whose family got a C128. I really wanted one
| when they were introduced, but ended up with an Amiga a
| couple of years later instead.
| vidarh wrote:
| Too late to edit but will correct myself slightly because
| the above might mislead: The C128 _did sell well for a 1980
| 's 8-bit home computer_ - about 2.5 million sold made it
| one of the best selling 8-bit computers ever.
|
| It just didn't sell well _for Commodore_ compared to the
| Commodore 64 and the Amiga. As a replacement for the
| Commodore 64, it was a sales disappointment. Most other
| manufacturers would have been thrilled with a failure like
| that, however.
|
| That said, perhaps more accurate would be to say that using
| CP/M to position the C128 that was didn't help much - even
| of the people who bought a C128, most never used CP/M.
| Though to some it might have been what allowed them to
| convince parents it was a "serious computer".
| jopsiHr wrote:
| CP/M on floppy came with my C128.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" I had a brief encounter with CP/M when I was 14 or 15 years
| old; I can't remember exactly. At the time, I was in high school
| in Aveiro, and the local computer shop, which I visited daily on
| my way to the train station, just to stare at the window, the
| same way a pilgrim would visit and contemplate at a shrine, had
| two beautiful machines on display: the brand-new Amiga 1000 and a
| C128D."_
|
| This hit me with so much nostalgia. Different parts of the world
| - same experience.
| forinti wrote:
| I would spend my vacations with my grandparents in Uruguay in
| the 1980s and 1990s. The shops had all sorts of micros, from
| Amigas to Coleco Adams.
|
| There was a small Amiga shop on 18 de Julio Avenue and I once
| took a friend from Brazil there and he was mesmerised; I
| couldn't get us out of there. I remember the owner was called
| Juan; he was a nice chap and we talked all afternoon.
| krylon wrote:
| I had a C128 as a kid, but I almost exclusively booted into C64
| mode to play games. I _did_ have a CP /M floppy, but I only
| booted it once or twice, had no clue what to do with it, and
| forgot about it quickly.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Same here. I had this vague notion that CP/M was something that
| grownups would use to do SeriousBusiness, but I had no idea
| what kind of applications it could be used for. Booted it once
| or twice and didn't see anything interesting. My C128 usage was
| about 80% games 20% learning how to program, so if they had
| built in some kind of programming language to their CP/M
| ecosystem I would have probably gotten more into it.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >I had a C128 as a kid, but I almost exclusively booted into
| C64 mode to play games.
|
| 95% of C128s spent 95% of their time in C64 mode.
|
| >I did have a CP/M floppy, but I only booted it once or twice,
| had no clue what to do with it, and forgot about it quickly.
|
| If 1% of C128 users ever used the bundled CP/M disk for more
| than what you did--boot it to see what it's like--I'd be
| surprised. 1985 was just too late to expect people to buy a new
| computer to run CP/M.
| NikkiA wrote:
| TBH Commodore made a mistake cancelling the C900 and releasing
| the C128, IMO.
| pgrote wrote:
| I was unfamiliar with that model. UNIX machine. Here is more
| info:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_900
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Wow. That could have been something! Might have been a
| commercial flop, but it would have exposed a lot of young
| folks to some useful ideas a decade or two before they
| otherwise would have been exposed.
| celso wrote:
| Funny enough, a few years later Commodore offered a port of
| Unix System V that ran on the Amiga 3000, I actually played
| with it in my University.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix
| phicoh wrote:
| They had an interesting hack to connect to a high-res
| monitor. Timing wise they had to stick to the standard TV
| timing otherwise regular Amiga software would not work. So
| they created a hack where the Amiga would send 4 screens of
| pixels that would then assembled and sent to a high-res
| monitor. Screen refresh rate was very slow though.
| cstross wrote:
| Oh wow, it ran MWC Coherent!
|
| I still have a (printed on dead trees!) manual for Coherent
| 3.2 (286 version, circa 1990-91) kicking around. Ran
| multiuser (login via tty or virtual terminals on the console)
| in 640Mb of RAM, off a 10Mb fully installed setup. If I
| remember correctly you were limited to 64Kb code & 64Kb data
| per process, though ... (Coherent 4.0 removed the addressing
| limit).
| fulafel wrote:
| Interestingly all 3 of C900, C128 and the Amiga are/were to be
| ~1985 machines (maybe 86 for the C900). I'd think from the
| specs (memory, CPU power, multitasking OS, hard drive as
| standard for the C900 etc) point of view the C900 was competing
| more with the Amiga than the C64-compatible 128k machine that
| didn't have architectural prospects of addressign more memory
| later.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I believe much of the team that was working on the S900 left
| Commodore with Jack Tramiel, and were involved with the design
| of the Atari ST.
|
| In particular Shiraz Shivji, who was the main designer of the
| ST, was part of the S900 project.
|
| Pretty sure the S900 was effectively dead before the C128
| project was even started.
|
| And in any case the S900 was a monochrome business computer,
| aimed at the productivity market -- a segment Commodore later
| targeted with PC compatibles instead.
|
| The C128 was targeted at consumers who wanted to run C64 games.
| jim_lawless wrote:
| We had a pretty active CP/M community in the 80's when the C128
| was released. Most of the time I spent in CP/M mode was either
| running Turbo Pascal or MEX ( the Modem EXecutive ... a
| telecommunications program. ) We had some CP/M bulletin board
| systems in the area with downloadable software and source code.
| This was where I first used archivers such as Gary Novosielski's
| LU / Library Utilty ... which was kind of like tar. It stored
| archives in files ending in the extension ".LBR". Versions of ARC
| were also used at the time. There were stand-alone versions of
| LZW and Huffman compressors ( Crunch and Squeeze, respectively )
| which were often used in conjunction with LU in the same manner
| that gzip is often used with tar archives.
|
| The posted article mentions how slow C128 CP/M when compared to
| comparable machines, but I really didn't notice. It ran quickly
| enough for my needs.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| There's a nice discussion re: the performance of CP/M on the
| 128 here:
| https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2361/why-...
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I think I've read somewhere you could use the 6502 from the Z80
| side, it would be interesting to run 6502 code while in Z80 CPM.
| celso wrote:
| Well, kind of.
|
| The Z80 and the 6502 (well, 8502 actually) CPUs share the same
| bus, and so there can only be one CPU running at one point in
| time. However afaik in CP/M and Z80 mode there are some I/O
| functions for the keyboard etc that halt the Z80, switch to the
| 8502, do what they do, and then switch back.
|
| I'm not sure if you can somehow programmatically switch from
| the Z80 to the 8502 and back, though. I suspect not.
| vidarh wrote:
| You can, but not at the same time. The data and address bus is
| shared. IO is done by the 8502 (the 6502 variant) when in Z80
| mode, but only one CPU is executing code at the same time - the
| other one is halted. It was a shame they didn't sort that out.
| I don't know enough about the Z80 to know how practical sharing
| the bus would be, the way the VIC and 6510 in the C64 does, but
| almost "anything" would've be better than the arrangement where
| either one is totally stopped.
|
| (If you have a floppy, though, the 6502 in the disk drive would
| still be available, and run in parallel, but the disk drive was
| both severely memory constrained and of course limited to the
| serial bus.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Looking for exactly the same for the MSX!
|
| - Any pointers?
|
| PS: Great post, by the way - I was also a "kid pilgrim" to the
| computer store. ;)
| nobleach wrote:
| While I had a friend who had a 128, we never thought to boot up
| that CP/M disk on his shelf. I had a Apple ][+ with a Z80
| daughter card, and a Pascal compiler... so I would have been
| interested if I had only known (I was 12 and not reading the
| right computer magazines). Years later I have tried all of this
| through Commodore emulation. It was fun for a bit and definitely
| felt nostalgic.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| I had a card to run CP/M on my Franklin (apple ][+ clone] it was
| to use WordStar I never used it. A computer store clerk in
| December 1982 basically said, "you should wait for the C64", but
| we just plowed ahead and got the Apple clone. It was easier in
| college as I could write my paper, take my 5.25 over to the big
| 24-7 study room at Rutgers, called the roost and they had a small
| computer print lab. I got a 3.5 disc and could use an Apple 11c
| the had with both disk types to move the doc over. Then I'd take
| my 3.5 disk over to a Mac and typeset my paper. For 86-89 that
| really felt modern. I just used AppleWrite or whatever knockoff
| name Franklin called it, and a couple of times when I had a
| longish paper I just spit it into two docs, I think the limit was
| under 15 pages. I wish I had gotten info on how to get going with
| CP/M there as I've heard Dos and Windows are based on it.
| nradov wrote:
| MS-DOS was inspired by CP/M to an extent, but not directly
| based on it. The device handling, BIOS functions, and command
| line were similar.
|
| When IBM first developed the PC they needed an OS. At first
| they tried to license CP/M from Digital Research since it
| already existed with many applications available. But when DR
| fumbled the business negotiations, Microsoft stepped in and
| offered IBM favorable terms for MS-DOS. It wasn't exactly
| compatible with CP/M, but close enough that the transition was
| easy for users and developers.
| phicoh wrote:
| You left out the part where Microsoft offered to IBM to
| create an operating system and then bought
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS which was written
| because Digital Research didn't release CP/M for the 8086
| soon enough.
| nradov wrote:
| I left out a lot of parts to keep the comment short. Whole
| books have been written about those events. _Accidental
| Empires_ has one perspective on the story, although I
| wouldn 't take it as completely accurate.
|
| https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/28/accidental-empires-
| chapt...
| stevekemp wrote:
| Some things were identical, for example .com files were
| loaded at 0x0100 which meant that before the start of the
| loaded program there was space for the FCB:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Control_Block
|
| This block would contain the command-line arguments, and have
| space for working with files (via FindFirst and FindNext),
| using the same globbing patterns as CP/M supported.
|
| Of course things changed when MS-DOS got support for
| subdirectories, and later int21 functions expanded filesystem
| support. Later still .exe files became more dominant as they
| could be larger than 64k (minus PSP).
| hnlmorg wrote:
| CP/M was also available for the Amstrad CPC machines too. I still
| have my disks somewhere.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| CP/M was the first serious OS I used. By serious I mean one with
| the full set of office tools (Supercalc, WordStar, dBase) and
| languages like BCPL, Pascal, C (BDS). I think this had a
| significant effect on my views on what can be achieved in a small
| system with scarce resources.
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