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. 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