Hello Daniel, I can only speak to your questions 3 and 4 here as I have no experience with the other subjects. I'll leave those for others to answer. :-)
On Sat, 2025-11-08 at 22:27 -0800, Daniel L wrote: > 3. Can someone describe their experience with the VT100 monitor > solution? > I have a small portable flat screen that easily handles the 24x80 characters that the VT100 requires. It is an excellent investment! With output on the flat screen and running CP/M, I was playing with WordStar, etc, and other CP/M tasks... I had forgotten that I was on a M-100!! However, you lose all the portability that you previously had with the M-100 or M-102. Your built-in display cannot do 80 characters, period. Also, you will be using that serial port now, since it drives the VT- 100. I mentioned it because you had expressed interest in WiFi, etc. For me, When I want to use the NADSBox to transfer files to/from the SD-Card, it involves disconnecting the VT-100 and connecting the NADSBox in its place, then reversing that when I'm done. Connecting the VT-100 is via the serial cable (as previously mentioned) and you will also need to power it via a USB cable to a USB power supply sunch as a cell phone charger. > 4. Can someone please describe their use case for CP/M on their model > T? The version of CP/M (2.2) is almost identical with the version on my Kaypro, although the manufacturers of the Kaypro made some enhancements to their version of CP/M. CP/M runs well on the VT-100 as you would expect, and also runs "OK" on the built-in 40-character display of the M-100, believe it or not. The text editor supplied with REXCPM is very similar to the built in text editor on the M-100 so that you won't have any trouble transitioning. Don't try to run any programs that need more screen room; bad things will result :-) With REXCPM you get a very capable CP/M machine that is easier to transfer files to/from than my Kaypro which has an SD-Card based floppy emulator and requires HxC software to create ".hfe" files, the only file format the hardware understands. No such trouble with REXCPM; that version of CPM has the command IMPORT and EXPORT to allow you to directly copy files from your SD-Card to the internal CP/M file system on the M-100. And what a CP/M file system! 3.5 MEGAbytes! :-) :-) :-) >From someone who is dealing with 390K floppies on his Kaypro 2X, a 3.5 Megabyte filesystem is heaven. :-) You only get 256 directory entries, but I haven't filled mine up yet -- and I only get 64 directory entries on my Kaypro LOL Please note that CP/M was originally built to run on 8080 processors and the M-100 and M-102 qualifies because they run 80C85 processors. The Kaypro runs a Z80 processor so some software (such as Turbo Pascal) will not run on the M-100 because it contains Z-80 instructions. I have not quite been brave enough to attempt the Z80 mod to the M-100. While you cannot run Turbo Pascal on your M-100, you can run WordStar. And while you mentioned increasing the clock speed of your CPU, I have not felt the need to do that; CP/M runs quite well on the existing CPU, as it was built to do. And no matter how large your file system is, your CPU will only address 64K of internal memory. The Kaypro switches part of that out for ROM using bank-switching; I do not know if REXCPM does something similar. I hope that helps. Regards, Bert
