New toy - full CP/M 2.2 micro

Any stories, collections or recollections of the earliest days of computers
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Phil_G
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New toy - full CP/M 2.2 micro

Post by Phil_G »

My CP/M box is huge, its a Micronix MX80 based on a Ferguson Bigboard, its significantly bigger then the very original PC desktops if you remember them. It has two 8" drives which are the size of a car starter battery and weigh almost as much. It lives in the loft and is unlikely to surface anytime soon - its just too unwieldy.

Recently however I've had a need for a Z80 CP/M 80 box and I really didnt want to dig the MX80 out (will it still work 30 years on?), and my favourite emulator Z80MU wont run on later Windows (no FCB support). I did a bit of research on modern-day retros - there are quite a few - and chose the Z80MBC2. Its a tiny board under 5" square, has 'disks' emulated on an SD card, a battery-backed real-time clock, 128k of memory (though CP/M 2.2 only uses 64k) and two uncommitted 8-bit I/O ports.

Its basically 3 chips including a genuine Z80 so you can DIY on stripboard, DIY on a bought PCB, or buy a kit. As a CP/M machine its superb, runs twice as fast as the MX80 and has much more storage - fifteen 8Mb disks - whereas an 8" floppy is 140kb. One hundred and forty Kilobytes. Not megs, not gigs - 140kb per disk!!! 8mb is huge in CP/M terms where there is only 64k of memory available to the whole system! There is a little bit of faff involved in getting files onto the CP/M disk, but its easy enough with the supplied windows transfer utility.

The software includes all the old cp/m utilities, mbasic, hisoft 'c', pascal, bascom, xmodem, forth, assemblers, loads and loads of stuff in addition to everything I've been saving for 40 years!

At the mo its running off my laptop serial but I'm going to build an ansi terminal for it, using Geoff Graham's (of Maximite fame) pic software.

As a retro toy its great but I bought it as a CP/M workhorse and its earning its keep already. Brilliant.
So brilliant its worthy of a case, not often that happens here!
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