Tip for Mac users of cpmtools; compile newer version from source

[Ben Chapman]

Hi all,

I've got an RC2014 mini with the CF Card/CPM upgrade. I've enjoyed building it and getting CP/M up and running on it. Cpmtools is a fantastic help to getting CP/M software on to the CF Card. I used this thread to get started with it.

I have a tip for MacOS users, but I wasn't sure whether to post this to the old thread or start a new thread. Let me know if it needs to be moved.

On MacOS, the cpmtools that is installed via `brew install cpmtools` is an old version. As such, it did not work with some of the suggested diskdefs files, especially to read multiple disks from one image via the offset parameter.

In order to get it to work for me, I had to compile from source, which was straightforward:

git clone https://github.com/lipro-cpm4l/cpmtools.git

cd cpmtools

./configure

make

# If you already have a diskdefs file that you want to preserve

# Otherwise will be overwritten

cp /usr/local/share/diskdefs /usr/local/share/diskdefs.orig

make install

Make install installs into /usr/local/ ... just as a homebrew installation would do. Note that make install will silently overwrite any existing diskdefs file that you have in /usr/local/share/, which is why I've added the line that makes a copy before running make install.

With this version of cpmtools, I was able to use the offset command in diskdefs, which did not work in the version of cpmtools that's installed by brew.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful to Mac users of cpmtools.

Best wishes, Ben

[Kevin Boone]

FWIW I found this to be true for the Linux version of cpmtools as well -- the version in the Fedora Linux repository is out of date, and I had to build from source. Happily, that's not particularly difficult.

Best wishes

Kevin