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Atari ST CP/M


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1 hour ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

That sounds pretty insulting. Why would someone go with CP/M in 1984 ?  GEMDOS for 68K self was done decently.

 

More interesting is hard disk support. Can someone describe in short what hard disk support was in CP/M ? Capabilities, filesystem ?

I don't know a whole lot about CP/M 68K,  but I've seen it documented in several places that it was the original plan for the Atari ST since both CP/M and GEM were Digital Research projects, and GEM was designed to work with CP/M 68K.    Seems that DRI started working on GEMDOS because CP/M was becoming rapidly outdated and the decision was made to port that to ST instead.

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1 hour ago, hwrd said:

 

My understanding was CP/M 68K did not have folders, and GEMDOS was something Digital Research had wrote recently (which had folder support).  Myself, I would not describe GEM nor GEMDOS as hacked together, although one can describe the port to the 68000/ST that way, if they wish.

 

The sense I got from the articles/interviews I read was the quandary of "older, real world tested code and implementation of CP/M 68K" versus "the more featureful, but not well tested in the real world GEMDOS". 

 

Some of what I've read about the situation made it sound like GEMDOS was put together quickly because of the issues with CP/M 68K.   Maybe such articles were  just referring to the ST port, IDK.  

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2 hours ago, zzip said:

Some of what I've read about the situation made it sound like GEMDOS was put together quickly because of the issues with CP/M 68K.   Maybe such articles were  just referring to the ST port, IDK.  

Yeah, I certainly don't know for sure.   ?

 

I think in Randy Kindig's interview with Leonard Tramiel (https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-104-interview-with-leonard-tramiel), Leonard Tramiel noted the Digital Research CP/M -vs- GEMDOS scenario. 

 

 

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This website has a good view of the development of GEMDOS versus CPM https://dadhacker-125488.ingress-alpha.easywp.com/the-atari-st-part-2/. Seems Digital Research's GEMDOS was a bit all over the place and Atari's programmers actually made it work (albeit limited by the time pressures they were under). CPM really isn't suitable for large storage devices like hard drives due to the flat file system, I'm grateful they made the swap.

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10 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

That sounds pretty insulting. Why would someone go with CP/M in 1984 ?  GEMDOS for 68K self was done decently.

 

More interesting is hard disk support. Can someone describe in short what hard disk support was in CP/M ? Capabilities, filesystem ?

I have a cp/m card in my Apple IIe, and hdd-sd card thingie which allows cp/m to run off a hdd.

I am very clueless on how it works, but I have an 32MB image partitioned into four 8 MB sections.

(a better description is at http://apple2.net/ under the 'Z80 Card' section in the sidebar)

 

It works, but sounds like a scaled back version of what the ST does.

 

Hope this helps.  ?

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  • 3 months later...

When we left school in 87, my friends and I all bought Atari ST machines from Silica Shop here in the UK with CP/M.  It was still relevant as an OS here, older business systems and many home computers either ran it or had it included as an option.  A friend of mine needed to learn COBOL (I think) and I wanted Wordstar and some other stuff on CP/M for work.  We both used the CP/M emulator with an external 5.25 drive and it worked great as I recall. 

I always loved how flexible the ST was.  My friends dad had them in his recording studio, at work we had Mega STs running Mac software.  I even upgraded my ST to run PC stuff.   Great times, great machines.
 

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On 3/29/2022 at 1:55 PM, hwrd said:

As I read this thread, I thought "I have to look for this".

Thanks for the download, much appreciated!!

 

(I do remember having a copy in '87, I think.)

I have just found these floppies. Is this the CP/M you uploaded?

IMG_6954.jpeg

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I remember getting the CP/M emulator as part of the freebies shipped with my 520STM I got from Compumart but never used it. 

 

I too, like many others at the time, assumed CP/M 68k was what was on the disk and that it was a subset of TOS in CLI mode not a Z80 emulator. Wonder if I still have them now.

 

edit: yep those look identical to the disks I got too, I had to take my STM back to Compumart as it had the loose TOS ROM problem and they fixed it and gave me a box of disks they were bundling with machines later.

 

 

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  • 3 months later...
  • 1 year later...

I used the Z80 CPM emulator to develop code for my z80 electrical control project for my electronics course i was taking. It sure made for easy debugging. I worked in assembler and C. I would go home at night put my code into the emulator, then develop new code. Single-step it using the debugger. Fix, and try again.next day would go back to collage, and download the new code into eprom. It it always worked. My class mates were always curious why my project was progressing a lot faster.

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