In my previous post I introduced a toy CP/M Emulator I'd been working on.
At the time it was capable of running the Infocom text-based adventure games, so I thought it was done. Of course I also wanted to run Microsoft's original BASIC and it turned out that was a challenge because the coding of their interpreter didn't use the standard CP/M entry-point for making syscalls (call 0x0005).
Instead of calling 0x0005 to invoke the BDOS/BIOS functions the BASIC interpreter used the single-byte CALL instructions which are available on the Z80 processor. There are a bunch of these instructions:
RST 00RST 08RST 10RST 18RST 20RST 28RST 30RST 38
Each of those instructions is equivalent to a call instruction with a fixed offset, "call 0x0010", "call 0x0020", etc. I had to rework the emulator to cope with this approach, which causes repetition but nothing too surprising. The end result is that now my emulator can run Microsoft Basic, Tasty Basic, and some more programs.
Things work but a couple of the syscalls are of the form "Return true if there is a pending keystroke", or "wait until there is keyboard input present and return the first character". I have some busy-loops which peg the CPU, which sucks but works. On the downside running the code on a MacOS machine has some weird issues with repeated keys and similar. So I need to look into fixing that for my own sense of peace.
I put together a little repository of binaries for playing with though, and that's been helpful. My emulator has a special flag which treats sub-directories as "Drives". So A: points to A/, B: points to B/, etc. That makes distributing and working with things easy!
- https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist
- Binaries for running on CP/M systems, organized by theme.