[Coco] C128 CP/M Re: model 4 cp/m

[Willard Goosey]

>Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2007 14:35:26 -0800 (PST)
>From: Dan Olson <dano at agora.rdrop.com>

>Now it's official :)  

You are now officially strange, and no one will remember your name :-)

>Of course, you need a 1571/1581 drive to actually read/write standard
>disks.  Honestly I don't *use* it much, but do have it.

Yeah, Commodore and their freaky disk formats, ick.  

>With the model 4?  

With lots of different machines.  I got curious last night and counted
up the number of different floppy disks I use, it was nearly 30!
Fortunately, only 4 are so strange that no other machine can touch
them.  

>I thought Apple and Commodore using the older drive were the only
>weird disk formats out there.  Though, any more, 8" floppy or single
>density could cause trouble.

There are some other machines that did slightly strange things that
can cause problems.  For instance, we've been talking about Kaypro
format disks.  The 10 sector (512 byte/sector) Kaypro disks can be
trouble for PC's with slow floppy controllers that can't quite keep
up.  

TRS-DOS disks (any variety) are notoriously painful to work with on a
PC because parts of the file-system get stored in the inter-sector
markings.  This makes modern PC FDCs freak out.

Once you get past the size and density of the disk, then there's the
problem of decoding the file system...

>I think there is a way to do that, 

Neat.  

>Speaking of weird, I always thought it would be need to get an XT running 
>CP/M using an NEC V20 in 8080 mode :)  That'd make writing those CP/M 
>disks on the PC a little easier!

That would be pretty cool.  I know the old 22nice emulator could put a
V20 or V30 in 8080 mode, but I don't know if anyone ever did a native
XT-V20 CP/M.

>It's not a bad machine, I think it uses the kaypro disk format as one of 
>the prefered formats, but is it's own beast otherwise.  It's got a good 
>keyboard and 80x24 video, but unfortunatly came along a little too late to 
>be of much use as a "business" computer.

Yeah, by the time Commodore gave up pushing PETs and whatnot as
serious business machines, the PC was taking over.

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko