CPC owner here, I'm sure there are many more. Anything in particular you're interested in or just curious?

CP/m 86 is an option as well.

Are text files on your systems still padded to multiples of 128 bytes with ^Z characters?

konc wrote:

CPC owner here, I'm sure there are many more. Anything in particular you're interested in or just curious?

Well, I'm going to receive a KAypro 10 from ebay. Once I used to have an Amstrad PCW8512 - but we lost it in 1995 or so. So I'll have questions how to find and transfer data to K10 when it arrives and other questions, about CP/m and what generraly it can run...)

My Commodore 128 supports CP/m, but i never tried it.

Were there CP/m games?

Cool thread! 😁

By the way, did you know that it was initally known as Control Program/Monitor
before it got renamed to Control program for microcomputers ?

I still have got some issues of popular electronics from the 70s which do call it by its old name..

Fun fact - The term "monitor" program also had a cameo appearance in the original Tron movie, I believe.
(Im not 100% certain, though, because I haven't watched it in the English version.)

The Sharp MZ series also had a monitor in ROM and had to load software like BASIC from datasette (or CP/M from floppy).
These machines were thus described as "clean computers" (they were not infested by MS BASIC, like the C64 was).

It's also interesting that CP/M's one and only official floppy format was based on 8 inch floppies.

seob wrote:

My Commodore 128 supports CP/m, but i never tried it.

As a kid I also was a proud owner of a Commodore C128D with CP/M 3.0 😀

gdjacobs wrote:

CP/m 86 is an option as well.

Yay! And DOS Plus also. It was CP/M-86 with a DOS compatibility layer.
In theory, someone could run an CP/M-86 emulator on that layer, which in turn runs an CP/M-80 emulation. 😉

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Were there CP/m games?

Yes, I think so. Zork and (Colossal Cave -) Adventure are the most popular I guess.
But once there were many more. Hunt the Wumpus, several chess games and so on.

http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/games/games.htm
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXcpm.html

Were any of the MS Flight Simulator games ever released for CP/M. I distinctly remember seeing a flight simulator running on a Z80 CP/M system many years ago. What could it have been?

I do. I have a very nice condition Heathkit H89 with original hard sectored CP/M boot disks which still work.

https://sites.google.com/site/digiloguemuseum … ---heathkit-h89

Errius wrote:

Were any of the MS Flight Simulator games ever released for CP/M. I distinctly remember seeing a flight simulator running on a Z80 CP/M system many years ago. What could it have been?

Hmm.. CP/M was used on may platforms. Games which were "portable" were often ASCII-based, so they could run on any terminal.
That's similar to text-mode games on DOS, but worse. On a PC, all graphics cards are MDA or BIOS compatible.

Not so on CP/M. The BIOS was a part of CP/M itself and had to be altered to fully take advantage of the hardware.
So I don't know if it already had support for ANSI escape sequences or if it supported something like "clear screen" or
go to position 1 (first line, first char).

Though I remember that Wordstar for CP/M-80 had to be configured for the terminal model, so perhaps it didn't..
Anyway, for a 64K operating system it was awesome! ^^

As for the flight sim, I'm not sure what it was. I mean, that genre was *very* popular, so there must have been CP/M versions, as well.
Perhaps it was an early version of Flight Simulator by subLOGIC ?

The Amstrad "Joyce" PCW was CP/M-driven and had several pretty graphical games, too.
For example the game "The Pawn" by Magnetic Scrolls, Head over Heels or Silicon Dreams.

Other interesting games were Planetfall, Starglider or The Leather Goddesses of Phobos. 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amstrad_PCW_games

The Amstrad CPC systems were marketed as gaming machines. Of course, the more powerful ones had a color screen.

The PCW was mostly an office machine, with several pretty awesome programs (most famously Locoscript, which still has stuff missing from modern word processors and operating systems, like a pretty cool multi-copy function), but also came bundled with several text mode graphical games (fixed width fonts + various non-alphanumerical symbols = graphics). Some were quite fun.

Still regret throwing away a perfectly functional PCW a decade ago... 😢

My C128DCR runs CPM and I've played Adventure A and C&W Adventure, and I think I played Zork 1 on cpm in 80col mode on the 128 too.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Were there CP/m games?

The most of games of that period hardly user any OS calls. 30 years ago I played with Yamaha MSX-2 machines which had a built-in CP/M ROM. Still MSX DOS was more popular, and the .com files with games (probably ripped from the cartriges) were mostly for MSX-DOS. I copied some to CP/M (was not trivial because the disk formats were quite different) and all of them worked. Indeed they wouldn't have worked on a generic (non MSX) CP/M machine.

ScoutPilot19 wrote:

Althought this site is mainly about PC's and IBM-compatibles. I wonder, do anybody here own Z-80/CP-m computers like Kaypro-10 or PCW8512.)

I had an unopened PCW8512 that I sold last year. It's basically a word processor so there isn't much other use for it, even though it does work with some floppy games.

There are lists of PCW games on Mobygames and Wikipedia. As you'd expect there are lots of text adventures.

Yup, it seems the PCW or "Joyce" really had lots of text adventures.
In some way or another, it was like an 8bit version of an IBM PC with Hercules graphics.
Too bad it lacked an AY-3-8912 sound chip, otherwise it would have been truly a more advanced version
of the CPC (who needs colours and low res graphics, anyway ? 😉 ) and great for musicans also.
Speaking of Amstrads and Z80 in general, there's a new OS called SymbOS -> http://www.symbos.de/

Did any of the PCW machines have expansion slots?

Errius wrote:

Did any of the PCW machines have expansion slots?

I used to have PCW8512 we trashed it in 1995 - it had not any axpansion slots( only modem could be added somehow I think.

ScoutPilot19 wrote:

Errius wrote:

Did any of the PCW machines have expansion slots?

I used to have PCW8512 we trashed it in 1995 - it had not any axpansion slots( only modem could be added somehow I think.

That expansion slot (well, expansion bus) on the back was the only expansion option available, but it could take various types of add-ons, some of which has their own expansion slot (allowing the addition of more add-ons). AFAIK, the following existed: modem interface, network interface, serial port expansion (also special nullmodem boards), parallel port expansion (for non-Amstrad printers), combinations of serial and parallel, mouse expansions (both for proprietary interfaces and the standards of the day), keyboard expansion, plotter expansion board (!!!), external floppy disk drive controller, external hard disk controller (+ hard disk, 10, 20, 30 Mb IIRC). I've personally seen the Amstrad mouse expansion board, a modem board, and a serial/parallel interface board.

Furthermore, the machine came in two flavours: 8256 and 8512. Difference: 256K memory and 512K memory (used as a RAMdrive; drive M:), a single floppy disk drive and two floppy disk drives.

The floppies used weren't "floppy", but stiff 3" (not 3.5") discs that were somewhat prone to failure. These existed in two versions: single density and double density. There was a modification available allowing the use of a single internal 3.5" floppy disc drive besides one 3" drive instead of external 3.5 or 5.25" drives. BTW, if your internal 3" floppy disc drive fails, it's usually the drive belt, which is fairly easy to replace.

IIRC, there may have been an "overdrive" kit available for the Z-80 processor...