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CP/M on a PIC32

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Steve Bradford

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Apr 21, 2017, 7:42:03 AM4/21/17
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If anybody is interested, purely for nostalgic reasons, over the last three and a bit years, I have been playing with CP/M on Microchip PICs. I started off with a PIC24 and added 64K Serial RAM. It worked but it was very slow. I searched the internet and came across a company called Olimex. They sold a PIC32MX prototype board (T795). And this served as a platform for my CP/M implementation.

I have recently updated the hardware to use a PIC32MZ micro-controller. This has 512KB RAM to play with.

Files are stored as FAT files - using files as CP/M disk images, on an SD CARD. .ydsk and .dsk images can be read.

The software is based upon the YAZE src, and has proved to be very reliable for me. The current hardware can run at an equivalent 84 MHz Z80

I haven't implemented I/O Ports so any CP/M programmes that read/write to I/O ports won't work.

Regards
Steve

Bill Lewis

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Apr 22, 2017, 10:35:19 AM4/22/17
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Steve,

I had done similarly.
I really liked the PIC32MX that comes in the 28-pin DIP package and its
pin configuration multiplexer.

But I gave up PIC32 because the development tools were just too dreadful to work with. (for me)

The Pic Kit 3 (or whatever it's called) debugger pod / IDE combo made
debugging so slow I mumbled 4-letter words and got rid of it all.

Bill

rabie...@gmail.com

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Apr 22, 2017, 4:42:58 PM4/22/17
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Hello Steve,

>I have recently updated the hardware to use a PIC32MZ micro-controller.
The PIC32MZ seems to offer a lot of opportunities.

Although it is not CP/M or a PIC32MZ, check out the Colour Maximite computer.
http://geoffg.net/maximite.html

Robert



Steve Bradford

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Apr 23, 2017, 9:07:02 AM4/23/17
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I can sympathise! Having migrated to the PIC32MZ, has forced me to use Harmony - and my personal opinion is that it is dreadful bloatware. But hey-ho, it's a free development environment, so shouldn't complain.

Steve Bradford

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Apr 23, 2017, 9:20:12 AM4/23/17
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It's amazing what can be done now-a-days! High clock rates and serial data! Everything back in the day was parallel for speed...

I have two vintage computers - both Amstrad - CPC464 and a CPC6128 - that was progress right there! How we are spoilt now - I have a raspberry pi, but don't use it, but for 30GBP (I think) I had to have one ;) It can emulate the vintage stuff with horses to spare

Steve
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