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A project log for Arduino Due CP/M Personal Computer

An affordable computer that anyone can make! CP/M for all! *** A RunCPM Project***

martianMartian 01/29/2019 at 03:210 Comments

This project for an Arduino Due CP/M Personal Computer is complete.  People should be able to follow what I've done to make a low-cost CP/M computer without too much effort, which was the goal.

..but I have some ideas for the future..

Software:

For a while I also added a fork of Tiny BASIC and I shared the code with a few interested people.  This meant the computer started up in BASIC and CP/M could be booted with a 'cpm' keyword.  But any further development of that idea is beyond the original goal for -this- project, so I will create a separate project for that in due course.  The BASIC allowed saving files into CP/M's drive B: and provided an autoexec function via a autorun.bas file.  It also featured some ANSI colour and block graphic support.

I've also experimented with a menu system to provide some simple organisation tools, such as a calendar, address book, card file, calculator, editor etc.  I'm looking at how the text versions of DeskMate worked on the TRS-80 Model III, the UI on the TRS-80 Model 100/200 and the Locoscript software on the Amstrad PCW8256.


Hardware:
I now have a larger spare project enclosure.  Something I may consider is relocating the internals (Arduino, SD card etc on the mounting board) to the new case.  This will would provide a much larger area for future expansion.

At present the computer is a black box with a USB cable, requiring another machine with USB to power it and communicate through a terminal.  I am interested in developing it into a standalone computer, again this would be a new project beyond the scope of this one.

The RC2014 Z80 computer can use a Pi Zero as a £5 graphics card.  It boots pigfx - a bare metal solution to drive a HDMI display and USB keyboard.  It supports an ANSI terminal and has some support for colour graphics.

https://hackaday.io/project/9567-5-graphics-card-for-homebrew-z80

https://github.com/fbergama/pigfx


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