Work with a museum restoring old cp/m machimes. We have about 8 Altairs and a dozen IMASI machines along with Heath/Zenith, SWTPC 6800s, bunch of Northstars, a slew of asr-33s and the only DEC PDP-9 in the country that is working!
Thanks for the info! I've just recently gotten into CP/M on my Apple IIe with GZ/80 card, and this was helpful to see. I really felt bad at the end when you found you had corrupted the disk in Drive B by rebooting while a file was open for writing. :-/
The only guy that made an actual system (killdall) as opposed to Gates Dos which was bought from another companies original design. And then swooped in on the IBM os for their modern line of computers right after Killdall dropped the ball on that one And only a few years later unfortunately a brilliant mind lost too soon
This has been very useful. Was able to use your guide to build mboot3 and Modem 7 for Altos Series 5. Tonight I'm going to try with my IMSAI 8800 and a 2SIO board.
I have a kaypro II that I purchased a year ago. I bought a floppy emulator and got that working, but wanted to to get the drives to work. I did try one time to get the serial port to work but didn't look into it that much. This is awesome inspiration. Id love to get it where I could transfer files across the room as that is the setup I have. Thanks for the information...
Thanks for this video, I recently restored my Kaypro II and had a hard time getting files onto it. Using this PIP command has been great using a serial cable. Thanks for the info brother! No other vids out there for this.
I have been hoping for a video like this. I have three Osborne 1s. I also just bought and Imsaii 8080 retrokit (look that up). I have been looking for a way to get some of the CP/M archive stuff onto my Osborne Executive over RS-232 or the Osborne Modem. Thanks for this video. I'm hoping it will help me get started.
'Thank GOD'🙏🏾 and thank you very much for sharing your support and time 😉 I'd like to know 🙄 if there is a USE for CP/M 🙄 The reason I am asking 🙄 I am a 'electronics/mathematics' major 😁 Looking to use some vintage hardware/software for a present day project 😉 Let me know 🤔 I look forward to hearing from you 😁
Interesting. One thing I enjoyed about CP/M was that some machines shared the same hardware setups for some of their features, and you could take the driver from another machine and make it work with very minor tweaks.
So what would it take to get a piece of software that wasn’t designed for the Kaypro II to run on a Kaypro II? I just recently got a Kaypro II, fixed it up and I absolutely love it! I had been wanting one forever. It’s also my very first CP/M machine.
@@80sCompaqPC The one other exception (which won't affect you on a Kaypro) is that code that makes use of Z80 instructions won't run on an 8080. Your Kaypro has a Z80, so that's not a concern.
PIP and X-COPY are your friends. There is a version of X-COPY that will run on an MS-DOS machine. As for windows, I don’t know as my information is dated back to the late 80’s. my issue is that I have a bunch of 8” floppies and 5¼ “ floppies disks. What you need to do is get a copy of X-COPY Receive on to your CPM system and then you can copy the full version of X-COPY to copy files over the serial ports between machines. This was what I was using back in the 70’s and 80’s. But it sounds that that there are other ways to do the same thing and as you can see, there is some assembly required. When I get my system up and running again, I will have to investigate mboot3.
Exactly. Also, don't forget that you can connect an 8" floppy drive to a PC. The pinout and setup of the drive are different than a 3.5 or 5.25 disk. Still, the geometries are the same for equivalent capacity, just the same as, in the case of the Eagle in this video, which has "Quad Density" disks (i.e., 80 track versions with the same encoding and other geometry equivalents with lesser density disks). It would allow you to image and write images for 8" disks. For example, with the Eagle, since it's an 80-track drive (and was available in single or double-sided versions, the equivalent formatted capacity for single-sided is 360KB, and double-sided is 720 KB. For the 5.25" disks like this, a 1.2MB drive is required, as standard 360KB drives cannot handle the double track density due to stepping and head width limitations. Likewise, a double-sided 8" floppy uses the same encoding and stepping as a 5.25" 1.2MB drive. What I'm saying mirrors what you're saying, when restoring some of these older machines to operation, you have options.
@@TheTXDj The next issue is the 8" drives. Gave them away back in the early 90's. Just one of my mini regrets over time. The drives were attached to a full CPM system and a dead hard drive. Just part of my conversion to PC's.
Hello! I found an Eagle II recently but I'm not sure it's working and I have no software for it whatsoever. What does this machine do if booted without a disk?
Absolutely nothing. It requires a disk. The images are out there, you just need a DOS or Linux machine to write the images to media. If yours is one of the 80-track drives, you'll need an HD drive so it can step to all 80 tracks, even though the media itself is not HD for this machine.
Awesome, it might actually be functional then. :D My only question then is can I use a computer with a 5.25" drive and Windows 9x to write a disk image of the CPM version it needs or does it specifically have to be DOS. If so what should I use to write the images. Also convieniently I happen to have a 1.2MB diskette drive installed in my main Windows 9x machine. :D
So if you have the drive, and that machine is win9x, it will probably work since 95/98 were still based on dos. You need either ImageDisk or TeleDisk, both of these are DOS utils that take a file and write a disk for them. The Eagle disks can be found in one of the archives out there, I think bitsavers has them. As you probably recall in this video, I talked about one of my originals being bad, so I imaged a replacement and transferred the disk into the original sleeve. I got that image from out on the interwebs. :)
Thank you! I am a noob to some of this. Maybe you can help. I have a Kaypro II and I have an HXC floppy emulator running Drive A with an SD card media and some images. I need to start getting some archived data onto a blank floppy image that the Kaypro will recognize. I don't really know where to start. any good resources? does what im describing make sense? thank you so very much.
Matt - yes, makes sense. Do you already have it up and running with the emulator? If so, and so long as you can present a "blank image" as perhaps B: drive, you should be able to manipulate that image the same as you would a physical floppy. Are you running off your floppies at all? Or just trying to get the virtual side online before archiving the physical media? I've never done the exact thing that you're talking about there - but if you're able to get the system A) running (off physical or virtual), AND B) are able to make the emulator give the machine a blank floppy image, however that emulator works- THEN C) I could do a video specifically about backing up data to another floppy disk, and the methods should be identical to your emulator setup. Alternatively - using methods nearly identical to what I described in this video will let you install software that you can use to image all your disks and archive them to your modern computer via serial.
This whole idea of "quad density" just makes life even more confusing, after single- and double-density, given that all the diskettes are _exactly the same._ There are actually only two densities of media: standard density and high density (HD). Standard density diskettes have from the start been able to handle 96 TPI just as well as they do 48 TPI: if they had a problem with 96 TPI in the radial direction they'd never be able to handle the much higher data density in the linear direction along the tracks. (96 TPI is, generously, 500 flux transitions per inch; even the outer track of a 320 KB double-sided 5.25" floppy has to handle thousands of flux transitions per inch.) And, from a floppy disk's point of view, "single density" and "double density" are _exactly the same density_ in terms of number of flux transitions. It's simply a change in encoding: you can think of MFM as doing better "compression" than FM encoding.
Nice video! I usually use a HxC FDD emulator on the host, in combination with a very handy tool I made to access the filesystem of most CP/M disk-images. My CP/M-style machine has one of the BIOSes where you can change the disk parameters as well, with support for double stepping in order to read 40-track disks in 80-track drives, so moving files about is pretty simple. The tool for importing and exporting files from CP/M disk images is located here: www.dropbox.com/s/lazhgftl94toduz/CPMdskTool.jar?dl=0
My mother in law ran Vista until last Christmas when we bought her a new laptop. I don't think it was bad after the service packs came out, but it had the stain of the name and had to go.
stonent I never had any complaints about vista once I got past the initial differences. Win 7 is vista with some minor differences. Of course I am weird, and I liked WinME also.
I liked Windows 8.1 It was a little less intrusive than 10 once you installed the Classic Shell program. All the Windows 7 menus were still there if you knew the commands to find them.
Hard? Not at all. I developed for years on it. To xfer files was a snap for me. I would either ise the debugged or assembler to write some tiny code to xfer files over the serial port. Did this for many, many machines
Hello ! I'm going to receive a Kaypro 10 from ebay ... Maybe there's a way to connect it to dos machine by LPT cable and to connect by some kind of software then ) ?
Not with LPT, but with COM. The Kaypro would be much easier than the machine in this video. There are terminal program disk images out there. Just write them to floppies with your DOS machine, and you're ready to go. You can transfer the files much easier that way, vs the way a machine like this Eagle would.
Work with a museum restoring old cp/m machimes. We have about 8 Altairs and a dozen IMASI machines along with
Heath/Zenith, SWTPC 6800s, bunch of Northstars, a slew of asr-33s and the only DEC PDP-9 in the country that is working!
Thanks for posting this. I’m new to CP/M, and was quite puzzled with the software archives.
Thanks for the info! I've just recently gotten into CP/M on my Apple IIe with GZ/80 card, and this was helpful to see. I really felt bad at the end when you found you had corrupted the disk in Drive B by rebooting while a file was open for writing. :-/
Surely the first file to transfer would be Kermit (or xmodem) and then use these to transfer everything else?
that is covered in the video. I used either IMP or MEX or MDM7 if I remember correctly.
The only guy that made an actual system (killdall) as opposed to Gates Dos which was bought from another companies original design. And then swooped in on the IBM os for their modern line of computers right after Killdall dropped the ball on that one And only a few years later unfortunately a brilliant mind lost too soon
CP/M on the Coleco ADAM has a huge following. Great to see more CP/M vids, even if this one is 7 years old!
Neat! Using the rare floppy drive or the cassette drive?
@@TheTXDj love using the floppy but now using SD cards in the ADAM!
Great video lots of explanation Not leaving very much out. Keep up the great work!!!
The CPM BDOS and BIOS offer a standardized API. You can use calls to those APIs to access the serial port.
Now I see why C drive was the hard drive designation. While A and B were for the double disk read and write until they came out with all in one drives
This has been very useful. Was able to use your guide to build mboot3 and Modem 7 for Altos Series 5. Tonight I'm going to try with my IMSAI 8800 and a 2SIO board.
I have a kaypro II that I purchased a year ago. I bought a floppy emulator and got that working, but wanted to to get the drives to work. I did try one time to get the serial port to work but didn't look into it that much. This is awesome inspiration. Id love to get it where I could transfer files across the room as that is the setup I have. Thanks for the information...
Thank You for this video I appreciate your hard work t is good to see CP/M after all these years I used to work /repair thies old classic systems.
Thanks for this video, I recently restored my Kaypro II and had a hard time getting files onto it. Using this PIP command has been great using a serial cable. Thanks for the info brother! No other vids out there for this.
Interesting video, im working on a CP/M Project myself, and this was very usefull :)
Incredibly helpful - thanks!
Tons of knowledge in this video
I like the color scheme more than the blah dos grey
I have been hoping for a video like this. I have three Osborne 1s. I also just bought and Imsaii 8080 retrokit (look that up). I have been looking for a way to get some of the CP/M archive stuff onto my Osborne Executive over RS-232 or the Osborne Modem. Thanks for this video. I'm hoping it will help me get started.
Wow that was entertaining...ALMOST makes me wish I still had my Kaypro I. :)
Hey! Sent you a message a while ago on the vintage computer forums regarding the bootdisks for my Vixen.
***** Oh hey, I'm not there very often, so I'll go check and see. Thanks!
'Thank GOD'🙏🏾 and thank you very much for sharing your support and time 😉 I'd like to know 🙄 if there is a USE for CP/M 🙄 The reason I am asking 🙄 I am a 'electronics/mathematics' major 😁 Looking to use some vintage hardware/software for a present day project 😉 Let me know 🤔 I look forward to hearing from you 😁
this was helpful for my Kaypro 2X running cp/m 2.2u
hy what is the name of that transformer from your avatar
How do you write a boot disk?
That is dependent on your system. You would have to format the disk and sysgen it, then you can copy files onto it.
have you ever done a video on your setup for how to connect a vintage CP/M machine to a more modern machine?
hy what is the name of that transformer from your avatar
@@LiviuDragon niggatron
I have a Sanco 8001 under CP/M 2.2, french machine with japanese components (Sanco = Sanyo + Cofelec). Just quite the same design as on this video.
Interesting. One thing I enjoyed about CP/M was that some machines shared the same hardware setups for some of their features, and you could take the driver from another machine and make it work with very minor tweaks.
So what would it take to get a piece of software that wasn’t designed for the Kaypro II to run on a Kaypro II?
I just recently got a Kaypro II, fixed it up and I absolutely love it! I had been wanting one forever. It’s also my very first CP/M machine.
As long as it doesn't require terminal controls, or bypass the operating system calls, it will run.
Alright, thanks.
@@80sCompaqPC The one other exception (which won't affect you on a Kaypro) is that code that makes use of Z80 instructions won't run on an 8080. Your Kaypro has a Z80, so that's not a concern.
PIP and X-COPY are your friends. There is a version of X-COPY that will run on an MS-DOS machine. As for windows, I don’t know as my information is dated back to the late 80’s. my issue is that I have a bunch of 8” floppies and 5¼ “ floppies disks. What you need to do is get a copy of X-COPY Receive on to your CPM system and then you can copy the full version of X-COPY to copy files over the serial ports between machines. This was what I was using back in the 70’s and 80’s. But it sounds that that there are other ways to do the same thing and as you can see, there is some assembly required. When I get my system up and running again, I will have to investigate mboot3.
Exactly. Also, don't forget that you can connect an 8" floppy drive to a PC. The pinout and setup of the drive are different than a 3.5 or 5.25 disk. Still, the geometries are the same for equivalent capacity, just the same as, in the case of the Eagle in this video, which has "Quad Density" disks (i.e., 80 track versions with the same encoding and other geometry equivalents with lesser density disks). It would allow you to image and write images for 8" disks. For example, with the Eagle, since it's an 80-track drive (and was available in single or double-sided versions, the equivalent formatted capacity for single-sided is 360KB, and double-sided is 720 KB. For the 5.25" disks like this, a 1.2MB drive is required, as standard 360KB drives cannot handle the double track density due to stepping and head width limitations. Likewise, a double-sided 8" floppy uses the same encoding and stepping as a 5.25" 1.2MB drive.
What I'm saying mirrors what you're saying, when restoring some of these older machines to operation, you have options.
@@TheTXDj The next issue is the 8" drives. Gave them away back in the early 90's. Just one of my mini regrets over time. The drives were attached to a full CPM system and a dead hard drive. Just part of my conversion to PC's.
Hello! I found an Eagle II recently but I'm not sure it's working and I have no software for it whatsoever. What does this machine do if booted without a disk?
Absolutely nothing. It requires a disk. The images are out there, you just need a DOS or Linux machine to write the images to media. If yours is one of the 80-track drives, you'll need an HD drive so it can step to all 80 tracks, even though the media itself is not HD for this machine.
Awesome, it might actually be functional then. :D My only question then is can I use a computer with a 5.25" drive and Windows 9x to write a disk image of the CPM version it needs or does it specifically have to be DOS. If so what should I use to write the images. Also convieniently I happen to have a 1.2MB diskette drive installed in my main Windows 9x machine. :D
So if you have the drive, and that machine is win9x, it will probably work since 95/98 were still based on dos. You need either ImageDisk or TeleDisk, both of these are DOS utils that take a file and write a disk for them. The Eagle disks can be found in one of the archives out there, I think bitsavers has them. As you probably recall in this video, I talked about one of my originals being bad, so I imaged a replacement and transferred the disk into the original sleeve. I got that image from out on the interwebs. :)
Thank you! I am a noob to some of this. Maybe you can help. I have a Kaypro II and I have an HXC floppy emulator running Drive A with an SD card media and some images. I need to start getting some archived data onto a blank floppy image that the Kaypro will recognize. I don't really know where to start. any good resources? does what im describing make sense? thank you so very much.
Matt - yes, makes sense. Do you already have it up and running with the emulator? If so, and so long as you can present a "blank image" as perhaps B: drive, you should be able to manipulate that image the same as you would a physical floppy. Are you running off your floppies at all? Or just trying to get the virtual side online before archiving the physical media? I've never done the exact thing that you're talking about there - but if you're able to get the system A) running (off physical or virtual), AND B) are able to make the emulator give the machine a blank floppy image, however that emulator works- THEN C) I could do a video specifically about backing up data to another floppy disk, and the methods should be identical to your emulator setup. Alternatively - using methods nearly identical to what I described in this video will let you install software that you can use to image all your disks and archive them to your modern computer via serial.
Great video. Subscribed.
On my Amstrad PCW8256 I've used Kermit.
This whole idea of "quad density" just makes life even more confusing, after single- and double-density, given that all the diskettes are _exactly the same._
There are actually only two densities of media: standard density and high density (HD). Standard density diskettes have from the start been able to handle 96 TPI just as well as they do 48 TPI: if they had a problem with 96 TPI in the radial direction they'd never be able to handle the much higher data density in the linear direction along the tracks. (96 TPI is, generously, 500 flux transitions per inch; even the outer track of a 320 KB double-sided 5.25" floppy has to handle thousands of flux transitions per inch.)
And, from a floppy disk's point of view, "single density" and "double density" are _exactly the same density_ in terms of number of flux transitions. It's simply a change in encoding: you can think of MFM as doing better "compression" than FM encoding.
Nice video!
I usually use a HxC FDD emulator on the host, in combination with a very handy tool I made to access the filesystem of most CP/M disk-images. My CP/M-style machine has one of the BIOSes where you can change the disk parameters as well, with support for double stepping in order to read 40-track disks in 80-track drives, so moving files about is pretty simple.
The tool for importing and exporting files from CP/M disk images is located here:
www.dropbox.com/s/lazhgftl94toduz/CPMdskTool.jar?dl=0
Hey! It was ahead of its time; those floppy drives boast the world's first dimmable LEDs LOL.
I think its pwm effect
Good vid. Thanks
Is that a theme or are you actually running Vista on the laptop?
stonent that laptop ran vista, yes
My mother in law ran Vista until last Christmas when we bought her a new laptop. I don't think it was bad after the service packs came out, but it had the stain of the name and had to go.
stonent I never had any complaints about vista once I got past the initial differences. Win 7 is vista with some minor differences. Of course I am weird, and I liked WinME also.
I liked Windows 8.1 It was a little less intrusive than 10 once you installed the Classic Shell program. All the Windows 7 menus were still there if you knew the commands to find them.
On Win8, I like Start8. It is a pretty decent classic shell replacement. same folks make "ModernMix" which lets you run metro apps in a window.
but can it run Venix?
Why would you think it would be capable of that? It's a Z80, not an x86.
thats a beauty!
Hey TX Dj,
If you have an extra IMSAI sitting on the shelf there and you could use the space, I would love to add an IMSAI to my small collection.
www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-1970s-IMSAI-8080-Micro-Computer/254135202314
CP/M is a very hard os
Hard? Not at all. I developed for years on it.
To xfer files was a snap for me. I would either ise the debugged or assembler to write some tiny code to xfer files over the serial port. Did this for many, many machines
Is Modem 7 Z80 code? I tried assembling it on my 8080 machine and it failed with many errors.
The original modem7 was 8080 code
As I recall, the 7 ment it would work with 7 bit ASCII data modem from PMMI and the modem protocol for binary data
Hello ! I'm going to receive a Kaypro 10 from ebay ... Maybe there's a way to connect it to dos machine by LPT cable and to connect by some kind of software then ) ?
Not with LPT, but with COM. The Kaypro would be much easier than the machine in this video. There are terminal program disk images out there. Just write them to floppies with your DOS machine, and you're ready to go. You can transfer the files much easier that way, vs the way a machine like this Eagle would.
Thanks I've found some info about that on Terry Stewart's site. I'll try it when the K-10 arrives)
Nice SILICONE GRAPHICS crt. Monitor
Abandoned Software: winworldpc.com/library
Isn't it just a dumb terminal....?
Nope. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Computer
I remember a program called nsweep but can't remember what it was for. LOL
Newseeep is a file manager