I am pleased to announce the release of DOS/65 V3. The release is contained in the ZIP file DOS65V3ZIP located in my directory under Builders Journal on PBWorks. Be sure to read the V3 Supplement PDF file in the ZIP collection. While the changes are small in number they significantly improve the utility of DOS/65 especially for those users having some sort of high capacity mass storage device attached to their system.
The key changes are:
1. PEM and CCM changes to implement a CP/M 2.2 compatible “USER” area concept for storage devices.
Addition of a COPY3 transient that is able to set source and destination USER areas for any file copy operation.
2. CCM changes to implement a CP/M compatible batch command processing capability.
3. Addition of the CP/M compatible SUBMIT transient command to initiate batch command processing by CCM
4. Change to SYSGEN to allow either .KIM or .HEX input files for the BOOT and SIM modules used when building a new system
5. Use of the IOSTAT defined but previously unused storage location as a means of exchanging USER and DRIVE data between CCM and SIM.
To implement these changes CCM has increased in length by one page to 2560 bytes. PEM length has remained unchanged at 3072 bytes.
All software has used 6502 op-codes and addressing modes. No 65C02-only code has been used.
The SYSGEN executable needed to configure and save a V3 system is SYSGN300.COM. That can be assembled from the supplied .ASM file and MAKECOM used to create the .COM file. Executing SYSGN300.COM then will integrate the user's BOOT and SIM files and save the resulting OS image to the user specified hard or floppy drive system tracks. All of these steps can be performed on a V2.17 DOS/65system.
As has been my policy for several years, complete source code is provided for all of the changed software, i. e., SYSGEN, COPY3, and SUBMIT. I also provide an updated, but still very slow, version of FILESTAT.BAS (FILES3.BAS) that recognizes and shows the USER area information for files.