On 1/25/2013 5:35 PM, yoda wrote:
Hi Douglas
As you know I am interested - but really on the CP/M 80 Plus
and beyond as I already have it running on a set of John's
boards.
Are you running John's version or have you got your own now?
Due to lack of hardware, I haven't been able to boot John's yet.
There is some business about the IOBYTE that is
causing John's BIOS to ignore my IO board serial port, so when it
boots, it bricks.
If I had a working system with plus, I would give consideration to
just going with that. For me, it is about getting
a usable build scenario so I have a known good starting point to
move on from.
Please what is the hardware configuration required to run what you
have?
I really want to work in conjunction with you and not waste
engineering time duplicating effort or moving backwards
instead of forwards.
I am also interested in making my utilities portable across the
operating system boundaries (with a re-compile).
I have been writing them in C since RomWBW 2.0. I would like to
dialogue with you about this topic.
The situation with the Makefile's is that my attempt at writing one
Makefile for all three platforms was rejected
as being overly complex, although it was only complex enough to do
the job in my opinion. I really don't like
the Windowsisms at all and would be happy to see them gone.
Unfortunately, Wayne (God bless him, and no
harm, to him intended, he is my pal) is totally involved with the
Microsoft way at work, and unfortunately his
choice of development platform is Windows, and he would rather write
CMD scripts then use the industry
standard "make". I have crafted three Makefile's for RomWBW, and
they work like this.
The three build folders for my makes are XSource, LSource, and
WSource. All these folders contain in the
distribution is a Makefile and a bin folder with platform specific
tools. You enter the proper folder for your
platform and say "make clean" and "make". it takes approximately 10
seconds on Windows, and about 1.2
on Linux, and about 2 on Mac OS X. The makefile coppies in needed
source files form ../Source and converts
the end of line as appropriate for the platform tools. The all
generated files end up in the *Source folder and
none show up in the Source folder, thereby leaving the Source folder
pristine. Wayne continues to use his
build.cmd and .ps1 files for the Windows build, and I am constantly
having to update the makefiles every time
he breaks things. I am ready to go back to one Makefile for all
three platforms but I have core issue
disagreements with Dave Giles about how platform tools are handled.
He wants each and every tool individually
installed by the builder on his system, then for the builds to find
them in /usr/local/bin instead if in a local
bin folder in the distribution. Linux seems to be the issue, Mac OS
X binaries seem portable, but there are so
many Linux distribs that it is hard to ship embedded linux platform
tools and hope they are compatible with
whatever religiously affiliated Linux distrib a builder had attached
to. I use Scientific Linux, which is in essence
Red Hat Enterprise Server.
I want to work things out with you and move forward optimally. Lets
keep that dialogue alive. The things you
are saying to me make sense and I trust your perspective.
There is definitely work to do on that implementation in the
IDE area because of the blocking in the driver is not
contiguous. Also as I had communicated, I am not in favor of
the windowisms that have crept into the process. I will help
try to minimize them. I will wait till you are ready to tackle
CP/M 80 Plus and by then I may have some of the code cleaned up
to help there. I think we need to be careful in the
implementation as with the direction of the boards, slave
processors are supported so there has to be some notion of
resource ownership to allow graceful handoff. I am going to be
working on getting CP/M 68K working on the 68K board as well as
the 68360 board that Andrew and I are working on in the
meantime. That is my 1st priority and then do some recoding of
the propIO to support greater than 80x25 screen. Hopefully our
schedules will intercept then and I can weigh in with my
suggestions on coding for CP/M 80 Plus. I still need to see if
we can do this in a cross compile environment as the current
implementation is tied to native assembler. I think we can
overcome that and need to do the same of the 1.4 version. The
current config file method being used needs to be implemented
using things like Makefiles, machine dependent files and
conditional assembly. I still need to ponder more on how to do
that in a scalable way. There will probably be parallel streams
of development in the interest of time as I don't want to hold
things up - but maybe it might be worth some design discussions
here before you jump into just porting the existing code base.
Dave
On Friday, January 25, 2013 5:14:45 PM UTC-6, douglas_goodall
wrote:
Friends,
There is a project underway to port Wayne's RomWBW CP/M
implementation
to the S-100
using John Monahan's S-100 boards. I am leading the software
effort and
Tom Lafleur is
leading the hardware effort. Leonard Young is on-board as
another
knowledgeable set of
eyes and brain pan to help the project stay on track. This
port of
RomWBW has Wayne's
blessing.
The reason I am contacting you is to let you know that there
will be an
operating system
available in the near future that has the same look and feel
as the
RomWBW you are used
to on N8VEM platforms such as Zeta, SBC-v2, and N8.
I would like builders that are using or intending to use S-100
with
John's boards to let
me know who they are so I can gather information about their
configurations and desired
support from the new version.
My intention is to begin with CP/M-80 v2.2, and then move on
to CP/M-80
Plus, and perhaps
MP/M-80 in time. I am open to other thoughts about this.
The more information I have about the builder's needs and
wishes, the
closer I can come
to fulfilling them. I only know about half a dozen people
using S-100
right now, and I know
there must be many more, and I believe my sample size isn't
large enough
to represent the
views of the N8VEM/S100COMPUTERS.COM
Community.
You may respond on-list or off-list.
Respectfully,
Douglas Goodall