Traveller software for CP/M?

[saundby]

OK, I just fired up an old Ampro Little Board computer tonight. (Long version on my blog ).

Now that I''ve got the core hardware running. I gotta start thinking software.

Not generating that kind of sectors...yet.

I've got Traveller software on my Apple II, so there's got to be something out there for CP/M. I can't see the "sixers" as being the only ones having all the fun back in the day!

 

[aramis]

PM Shadowbear, CC me. I know he did some for personal use, which may go back to CP/M...

I was never good enough at programming in those days to make it worth while.

 

[far-trader]

You hurt my brain. Thanks for the flashback to CP/M programming on my old Sinclair

I vaguely recall doing a basic character generator, world generator, and maybe that kind of sector generator (started at least). But I'm sure I don't have any of it anymore (the Sinclair died in a flooded basement and I tossed the remains ages ago... ).

 

[robject]

WOW. CP/M! Does it have a BASIC interpreter? Or, perchance, a compiler (not likely)?

 

[Whipsnade]

CP/M... Wow...

That brings back delightful memories of my old "portable" KayPro II...


Regards,
Bill

 

[aramis]

WOW. CP/M! Does it have a BASIC interpreter? Or, perchance, a compiler (not likely)?

Kaypro CP/M shipped with a basic compiler... SBasic.
ISTR that Osborns did as well.

Plus they had obasic and mbasic (on both). I've a functional Kaypro...

CP/M... Wow...

That brings back delightful memories of my old "portable" KayPro II...


Regards,
Bill

Yup, that's the model! (The "Old II"... the "New II" and later were all MS-DOS...)

 

[saundby]

I sent a PM to Shadowbear. I'm afraid I don't know how to cc you on it, Aramis, I didn't see a field for that and the compose PM page tells me I can only send to 1 recipient at a time.

I've got MBasic, SBasic, and CBasic all around here somewhere. I'm still trying to locate my general stash of 5-1/4" CP/M software. The 8" disks are easy enough to find. The Little Board requires tweaks to handle 8" drives, but if all else fails I'll pull out my old Big Board system and run a serial cable between the two.

The Ampro system disk had ASM.COM on it. So I guess I've got everything I need.

I'm still mostly in the fussing with hardware stage at this point. But once I've got the hardware sorted out I'll be wanting software for it. Especially since I'm planning on getting a hard disk on this system.

Last night I stuck the system into an old PC box so that it wouldn't be loose pieces with cables floating around. That will keep the cats out of the works and make the living room look less like Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. Next I'll be hooking up a 3.5" floppy, creating a system disk for that format, then pulling all the drives out and setting the drive selects to allow a four disk system with two 5.25" and two 3.5" drive.

Then I have to figure out if I can use any of the hard disks I have on hand. The docs say the system can use anything up to 88MB, but I don't have any SCSI drives that small available (the ones I do have are already in other vintage systems I'm not willing to tear apart.) So I need to see if I can format a larger drive, or lie about the number of heads/cylinders/tracks on a larger drive and format it as an 80MB if there are file system limits I'm up against. A quick look at the assembly code for the hard disk formatting utility last night makes it look like it can handle anything up to about 500MB. I think I have something smaller than that, still, that's not spoken for.

If all else fails, I do have some small MFM drives around and I believe I can still get an Adaptec 4000 SCSI adapter for not too much.

Meanwhile, I've got to open up my terminal and adjust the screen rotation. It's off by about 5 degrees. The left side of my neck tells me that needs fixing.

 

[saundby]

CP/M... Wow...

That brings back delightful memories of my old "portable" KayPro II...


Regards,
Bill

I had an old Kaypro II years ago, one of the originals from Non Linear Systems (before they changed the name of the company to match the computer.) I sold it to some folks running a small business in about 1988, I still regret doing that. It was at a time when I felt I had to limit the number of computers I own, for some reason.

My favorite system I've owned of all of them was a Kaypro 10. I lived off that system for years. I remember that I loaded a plethora of development systems, games, and all sorts of stuff on that system, never cleaned up the hard disk and never felt constrained. Unlike the 20MB hard disk on an XT that promptly filled up, and was replaced by a 40MB hard disk which promptly filled, which...well, you get the idea.

I've come by another Kaypro 10 but it's proved to be a poser. It had a bad hard disk, and I've got a replacement, but the ROM in it is an Advent TurboROM which expects to be installed on an already working Kaypro 10. So it looks like I'm going to have to find an original Kaypro ROM image, burn it onto a chip and put it in the system, restore the system to the original state using my K10 restore disks, then go through the Advent upgrade process if I want to put that ROM back in. I think I've got all the software on hand, but I'm not entirely sure. I may have to drum up the Advent TurboROM software online somewhere, or see if it's living on an old system I have that apparently belonged to one of Emerald Microware's developers.

But that's another project...

 

[saundby]

Hard Disk Installed

I just finished installing and setting up a hard disk in the Ampro system, so I'm going to start loading software tomorrow.

I've got a 1.1GB Seagate SCSI drive in it, but the system only uses 88MB of it. There are eleven 8MB partitions. The regular CP/M BDOS is limited to 8MB per partition, and my BIOS is set up for drives from A: to P:. Since A-D: are spoken for as floppy disk drives, and E: is a special drive designation used for floppies with foreign formats (MS-DOS, Kaypro, Osborne, etc.) that leaves F-P: for the hard disk drive.

88MB is an enormous amount of space for CP/M. I'm tempted to write an MP3 player for CP/M just so I can fill up all that space with data. :rofl: On my prior systems, I've never filled more than 8MB, even with multiple development systems, lots of documents, and a truckload of games on board.

Anyway, I'm going to start moving software over from some Kaypro disks. Wordstar, MBASIC, dBaseII, that sort of thing.

Then I'm going to pull out an old Unix box and hook up a DDS tape drive so that I can take a look at an old tape with an archive of some CP/M ftp sites. Maybe there'll be some Traveller software there that I pulled years ago.

 

[robject]

Tell me what sort of software you'd like. I'm sure we can all do enough BASIC to cook up some Traveller programs for it.

UWP generation with Animal Encounter tables might be the easiest place to start.

What's the random number generation function in one of those BASICs? RAND? RAND(X)?

I can't remember how to do arrays. DIM(X)? It's been over 20 years...

 

[aramis]

The basics for CP/M are old Microsoft basic and S-Basic; SB is a space delimited structural programming using basic commands, not unlike Qbasic.

Also Assembler and some flavors had C & pascal.

 

[saundby]

I've got several flavors of BASIC, MBASIC and a compiler for it, CBASIC, SBASIC, and at least one TINY BASIC--Palo Alto TB, IIRC, and perhaps Pittman's.

I've done professional work in all of them.

My favorite languages for CP/M/8080/Z-80 development were FTL Modula-2 (the bast implementation of that language I ever worked with, including the $3,000 dollar version from Green Hills or Avocet or whoever it was) and the more sophisticated relocatable macro assemblers. I seem to recall the one from MS was the best. I've still got those around, as well as BDS C.

Presently I'm trying to figure out how to get a system disk image off the Ampro for a fellow who needs one. Each approach I've tried so far has gotten overcomplicated. So I pulled an old 286 with a Compaticard and a bunch of utilities like 22Disk and Uniform on it out of my garage. If I can remember how to use it, that should do the trick...the docs have gone walkabout on me.

 

[Shonner]

I programmed a subsector generator in FORTRAN on a DEC-10 mainframe back in '83. Then in BASIC on a Sinclair ZX-81. Fun stuff.

 

[Thunderbolt]

Woo hoo, CP/M and Microsoft Basic!

I had a Apple IIe with the Z80 processor board and CP/M disk. Came with Wordstar and Microsoft Basic.

Wrote a sector generator and animal encounter table generator all those years ago. Managed to port them across to GW/Basic when I got my first PC back in 1986.

I look back at the source code and wonder how on earth I managed to write anything where all variables are global and single letters too!!!

 

[saundby]

Old systems fighting for time and attention

I've been fooling around with Turbo Pascal 3.01 and assembly language on my Ampro system so far. Nothing really serious, since I've got two other projects going and am supporting a third (and this is all outside my regular work.) I'll probably load up FTL Modula-2 when I uncover the disks and work with that when time permits. I've also got a set of old CP/M club disks on a CD now. The listings of what are on the disks are awful, though, so I'm going to see about automating the job of decompressing the disk images and getting a directory off them to see what's actually there.

First, though, I want to finish my 8085 SBC trainer project and its documentation on the web.

I suppose if I really want ready-to-run Traveller retroware I should pull an old "Model 2 bis" out of the garage and recalibrate the drives...