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General Category => Applications (CPC and CPC-related) => Topic started by: Fran123 on 08:48, 28 January 22

Title: CP/M and M4 or UsifacII
Post by: Fran123 on 08:48, 28 January 22
Hello,


Is there any way or project to boot and use CP/M with the M4 board or UsifacII?


Thanks!
Title: Re: CP/M and M4 or UsifacII
Post by: HAL6128 on 10:11, 28 January 22
If @d_kef (https://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=4731) changes his mass storage routines of his CPM version then it would be possible. But access M4 or X-Mass, SF3 are different.
Title: Re: CP/M and M4 or UsifacII
Post by: d_kef on 11:29, 28 January 22
The CP/M hard disk driver I wrote implements the BIOS routines READ and WRITE.
CP/M itself expects those routines to get as parameters the DMA address, DMA track and DMA sector. So my driver reads the CP/M DMA sector and track, converts them to the corresponding LBA address and reads or writes a sector of the hard disk. This way it only occupies 225 bytes of RAM.

The ROM itself contains routines for examining the hard disk (MBR, boot sector, FAT file system) and decide which and how many image files and/or partitions will be mounted.It finds the first sector of each mounted image file or partition and copies them to a table in the driver.

So if the said interfaces allow accessing the media sector by sector then it would be relatively easy to make drivers for each one of them.

d_kef
Title: Re: CP/M and M4 or UsifacII
Post by: HAL6128 on 12:12, 28 January 22
Regarding M4 there are information about how to read / write a sector of the M4 card. By the way, the M4 was highly sold in the CPC scene (Duke said something about 1000 pieces), so it could be worth to write a corresponding change / driver.




www.spinpoint.org/cpc/m4info.txt (http://www.spinpoint.org/cpc/m4info.txt) (see lower part of the site)
Title: Re: CP/M and M4 or UsifacII
Post by: Mark_wllms on 13:37, 28 January 22
 The USIFAC II can already mount and boot CP/M 2.2 directly from disk images. This is because it emulates the CPM 2.2 Bios stored in the Amsdos lower ROM. I use this to load Infocom games on my CPC6128.

You can't currently boot CPM 3 disk images, because the BIOS is loaded from the disc not run from ROM, so it can't be modified.

My preferred solution is to use the USIFAC to load a modified CPM 2.2 from Dobbertin that uses the additional memory in 128k machines to give a 61K TPA., giving the best of both worlds!
Title: Re: CP/M and M4 or UsifacII
Post by: d_kef on 16:53, 29 January 22
Quote from: HAL 6128 on 12:12, 28 January 22Regarding M4 there are information about how to read / write a sector of the M4 card. By the way, the M4 was highly sold in the CPC scene (Duke said something about 1000 pieces), so it could be worth to write a corresponding change / driver.


Noted... ;D


Almost there...... https://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/applications/hdcpm-boot-and-run-cpm-plus-from-hard-disk/msg213560/#msg213560 (https://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/applications/hdcpm-boot-and-run-cpm-plus-from-hard-disk/msg213560/#msg213560)


d_kef

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