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Adam CP/M and EOS


Milli V

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Is it possible to access EOS routines within CP/M? Can I toggle the rom back in to access them and then toggle the ram back when done? Or - do I have to rewrite EOS routines? I am mostly looking ot use the video routines - custom fonts - colors etc and will let CP/M handle the rest. Additionally - was there every a source code released for the Adam version of CP/M?

 

 

 

Milli

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Well, I would think that there would have to be. After all, you are seeing fonts on the screen all of the time in CP/M, and they are being generated by the VDP. So...how? Maybe you aren't interfacing with a BIOS like on a PC, but instead speaking directly with the video card (if I can still compare it to a PC).

 

I wish my memory was better. A friend and I hacked an Apple //e with the Microsoft CP/M card in it (using inline assembler in Turbo Pascal), so that we could do simple point plotting using the Apple graphics We were in the middle of writing routines to make squares, circles, etc. when we got too busy with finals, and we never went back to it after high school. I imagine that the Coleco interfaces somewhat in the same way.

 

But that was almost 30 years ago. Sorry I'm not more help.

 

Do you have access to the CP/M source code? You would need to look at how it outputs characters and build up your own libraries.

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When you boot CP/M from data pack or disk, it overwrites the Adam EOS that is placed into memory from rom when you turn on the system or press computer reset. I'm sure there are a lot of shared code between the two OSes for obvious reasons, but beyond that they do not work in conjunction with one another. For instance, it was common for people who were heavy into CP/M to pull the EOS rom chip on the Adam Logic Board and replace it with a rom chip that had CP/M burnt to it. With this setup, when one turned on the Adam, it would boot into CP/M and if the user wanted to switch to the standard EOS, they could boot the Disk Manager program that came with the disk drive as it loads EOS 7 into memory first before loading the Disk Manager program.

 

I have not seen any source files for Coleco's CP/M, but someone like Ron Collins or Tony Morehen had to have disassembled it back in the day to facilitate all the enhancement they made to it over the years which eventually came to be known as T-DOS.

 

Some of the best EOS programs were actually developed in CP/M, such as File Manager by Tony Morehenm

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Yes, what NIAD said. It is not loaded.

 

But since it is still physically in ROM, can it be tapped into somehow? Its not loading, but can a programmer load portions of it? I'm just thinking out loud.

 

Otherwise, it is bare-metal programming, like I said before. Whatever routines are built-in to the TI graphics chip, for instance.

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