Thanks David! (and John also) Your notes will surely be a big help to other S100 users who are trying to get their systems to come to life. I'll try this when I get some free time. Leonard From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Monahan Thanks David, I have also made a note at the bottom of the S100Computers web page http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/IDE%20Board/My%20IDE%20Card.htm Good luck with the CPM3 banked progress. Hopefully one day somebody will write a bullet-proof, all in one program, to get CPM3 on to these CF cards from Windows in one fell swoop feeding in only the console I/O port etc. variables John From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of David Fry Hi Leonard, Just thought I would post you some feedback on how I have got on over the last few weeks bringing the Z80 up to a CP/M prompt. I started out by reading John's excellent article on 'Bringing Up CPM3 For The First Time On a IDE Hard Disk Based System' I read it several times then realised that I was in a chicken & egg situation as I didnt have access to a CP/M system to get the system track (CPMLDR) laid down let alone getting the other files onto my CF card. The utility that John provides HSYSGEN.COM still needs to run on a CP/M system, so after searching this forum I found an old post where a member mentioned a utility HxD (sorry cant remember who it was but thanks for the light bulb moment). This utility is a Hex Editor that allows you to work with disk file images and CF cards directly, the only problem standing in the way is that the current method of writing to disk in LBA mode leaves holes in the disk sector map. This made direct sector editing/writing somewhat difficult so the easiest option for me was to rewrite the wrlba: routine in John's ASM files to convert the CP/M track and sector requests into a linear LBA sector number and remove the holes, making disk sector editing a possibility now that i can predict where to place the data. I must point out that there are some limitations to my solution, in that the disk configuration must be 256 tracks, 64 Sectors, and 512 bytes/sector (specifically 64 sectors) which gives a 8MB drive but I have a few ideas that may fix this if it ever becomes necessary. Anyway to cut a long story short I now have the system up to a CP/M 3.0 (Non-banked) command prompt and am thinking about moving on to a 'Banked' setup before dragging all the utility files across from the Altair simulator. I have spent the last few days writing up my process and gathering together all the file sets that I used in getting my system working and have uploaded it as a single ZIP file "CPM3_LBA.ZIP" to my N8VEM workspace I have also uploaded two MSword documents (included within the ZIP archive) 'Z80_LBA_Addressing.DOC' and 'Z80 CPM3.0 Build.DOC' so that you can read these first. I hope this information may be of interest and of use to you and others in the future. Regards David Fry
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