CP/M is Back On 05/18/24

CP/M is Back On 05/18/24
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I got the old Grant Searle CP/M machine running again today[1]. This
one is built on a PCB designed by Herman[2], with the optional CF
board. I'm not a huge fan of the PCB setup (especially the CF board,
which just kind of hangs off in space and has no mounting holes), but
it works.

My old 128MB CF card has been sitting in there, and appears to still
be working fine. I had a little bit of a time recalling how the serial
ports were supposed to be set up, but I finally got that going. It's a
bit of a mess, but that's alright.

For a terminal, I use a Briel Pocketterm[3] that I've had for ages. It
has a custom ROM by SDF user ajv, which I've customized further. My
version allows switching between VT100, VT52, and Raw modes, which
suits my purposes in CP/M quite well. I have an ESP32 FabGL deal[4]
that I'd like to use as a terminal, but I haven't bothered soldering
up a serial port to it yet.

The keyboard is an old PS/2 keyboard from a Sony Vaio. It's a little
stylized, but has that old 90's keyboard feel. Maybe it's from the
early 2000's, but it works.

First thing I ran was Ladder[5], which is quite a fun little game (and
blazing fast!). Back when you couldn't download 10k games in an
afternoon, they made them much harder to master. I also fired up a
tetris clone, Quatris, a text editor called te, Wordstar, MBasic, and
a few other things. I had previously written some mbasic "cls"
commands for vt100 and vt52, and I tested those as well. Tested a few
other things (calculator, and I can't recall what else) as well.

From my files, I recall that back in the day I was working hard to get
serial communications working between this and my linux PC. I have a
slew of comm programs, but I seem to recall not having great success
getting them to work right. I'll have to pick that up and try again.
One of the core things I want out of a retro computer is the ability
to get information in and out of it. I believe I have some CP/M disk
utilities to manage the CF from linux (somewhere around here), but I'd
prefer to have I/O from the running device if possible.

(an old trick I used to use gwbasic or qbasic, available on most DOS
setups, to write a quick and dirty file transfer program for the
serial port. I'd immediately transfer the program FastLynx 2.0[6] so I
could transfer anything else I wanted with ease. That, of course,
doesn't apply here.)

Next steps with this thing, for now, will probably be some more serial
comms experimenting, followed by some writing in the editors. The
machine is perfectly usable for writing, of course. And some more
games (I don't think I ever got aliens to work on this thing...)

[1] http://searle.x10host.com/cpm/index.html
[2] https://oshwlab.com/Herman/Grant_Searle_CPM_System-4rpLJZaYk
[3] http://retro.hansotten.nl/6502-sbc/apple-1/replica-1-briel/pocketerm/
[4] https://www.lilygo.cc/products/fabgl-vga32
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_(video_game)
[6] https://winworldpc.com/product/fastlynx/2x