Various thoughts in response to this entire thread... I like Pro-DOS because it feels like a real operating system. But I've never seriously used it. It's a shame that CP/M didn't offer standard (albeit likely to be much-slower-than-native) graphics routines, or maybe there'd be a whole bunch of graphics adventures and 'useful' productivity software.
I'll obviously need to save up for a Trinity or an Atom Lite. It's a shame neither do FAT32 + virtual images, even if it was just something like, e.g. having a read-only FAT32 partition on one part of the flash and a read/write Sam partition on the rest. Then at least only one piece of software for transferring from file system images to Sam-segment images would need to be written, for the Sam itself. And all PC OSs that can read/write cards and know FAT32 would work immediately. I'm actually not bad with low-level floppy formats and the WD177x having implemented a theoretically 'perfect' emulation of the latter for my ElectrEm project. I can't think of a reason for a normal, public domain program to go straight to the WD177x though, unless it really needed the memory that Sam DOS sits in. Maybe there's something I haven't thought of? I take it from the talk of different versions of B-DOS that the neither the Atom nor Trinity interfaces make any attempt to look like a WD177x in hardware? Re: the DS, I must remember to implement an optional 'square pixels' mode in my 3d engine. It'd be fairly easy to do as a tiny bit of dynamic reprogramming at runtime, though it'd probably mean you could see slightly further top to bottom. Or slightly less far left to right. Regarding that whole topic, some weekend work on the most critical segments has bought me a 20%+ speedup and I'm hoping to wring some more from the code overall. Next initiative: switch the face visibility tester to use a neat scalar/2d vector multiplication 'trick' that I'm sure everybody else thought of years ago — I'm loading the multiplier once to shift right and conditionally branch and simultaneously doing the multiplicand shift left and answer additions in both hl and hl' so as to multiply two multiplicands by the same multiplier for less than it would cost to do them individually. And I'm very, very proud of that. On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Steve Parry-Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >>>Steve Parry-Thomas has been using a Spectrum emulator to convert CPC >>>CP/M images to a format that Pro-Dos can read. Edwin has also been >>>working on storing CP/M images in Atom records, so no floppies needed >>>there either. > > Yep! I have tried to restore a number of HiSoft Packages that were for the > cp/m 2.2 system. Some files were missing from some of the images in the > Amstrad archives. Missing files were found in the cp/m MSX archives! > > The files were moved to MS-DOS with a MSX disk image manager, then moved to > a Pro-DOS floppy with 22Disk - dos program. > > Other files were in the wrong disk format, so loading the image into > Spectaculator 7, then I can open the B drive as a 720 image and copy the > files over into the new image, which SIM Coupe with Pro-DOS can read. > > There is around 60 new disk images on the Pro-DOS site, including a number > of Infocom IF games , with HiSofts CP/M FTL Modula-2 coming later. > > > Steve. > >
