Thanks for the tips! I recall reading about the performance hack and meant to try it in the past but never got around to it. Will have to give it a shot.

@@retrobitstv I have been meaning to try it out too but never got 'round to it. :)

Cool, I will have to find a copy and give it a try and see. I did try IBM Personal Editor per your suggestion on Twitter but that also failed to run on the Kaypro.

Looks like that's how this computer's display shows that the cursor is on top of a character. To use typewriter terminology, DOS feeds a line _and_ returns the carriage when a command is run, whereas CP/M only returns the carriage.

Hah, I was in a Commodore club and we had no such split. We were all 8-bit users until some fancy pants showed up with an Amiga for the first time! Back to the Kaypro: I will be doing a re-test of DOS software on it once I repair a faulty RAM board and then we'll get to see what it can really do!

Glad you enjoyed it!

Nice! I didn't realize there were additional maps beyond the second one because I stopped playing after it went back to "Easy Street". I will have to revisit the game and play it more!

Nice. CP/M 86 is an area I didn't get to explore at all but something I'd like to poke at. Supposedly the CoPower-88 board can run it, I just need to find some software that's compatible with my hardware. Curious to see how much of a different running the 16 bit version makes.

I haven't gone back that far in the timeline but it's certainly something I will have to check out! I did read about the earlier DEC operating systems influencing CP/M in my research though. I also found that there were lots of software offerings to enable reading of different disks formats so I guess the market stepped in to fill that need. I didn't get a chance to play around with any of those either, I was too busy writing disk images :P

The ImageDisk software has configurable compensation so you can write an image that was taken using a 250kbps drive on a 300kbps HD drive, but I didn't want to introduce any more variables than I already had to deal with. It's also possible to modify a 360 RPM drive to spin at 300 RPM per dunfield.classiccmp.org/img42841/speed300.htm.

Agreed. At least there are some archives of Kaypro software out there. I imagine it's much harder to find stuff for any of the hundred less popular CP/M machines out there :( I had some trouble getting clean reads of the original disks so I'm going to have to take another pass it it. If I get clean reads I'll upload them all to archive.org.

Thanks! Yea, DOS is pretty simple in that regard, but I do remember the early days of Linux - recompiling my kernel every time I made a hardware change was an overnight operation and if you got it wrong you'd have to try again the following night!

Thanks! Apple, Atari, et. al. had Z-80 add on cards that allowed them to run CP/M. Unfortunately, I don't own any of those add-ons (yet!). The C128 came from the factory with both a 6502-based CPU as well as a Z-80 so it was able to run CP/M out-of-the-box.

Not lazy programming - bypassing the IBM BIOS was for speed. Lotus 123 bypassed BIOS to write directly to video hardware and being fast helped it become the #1 selling spreadsheet on the IBM PC, beating the previous market leader Visicalc

I picked the only Kaypro definition that was available in the config program and it mostly worked: I could move around the editor, insert, delete, etc. but whenever I typed anything it just appeared as 1s until I hit return. I imagine just one of the many terminal settings is wrong, I just need to figure out which one!

I will continue my quest to get MS DOS 2.11 working on the system and see if that changes the results. Thanks for watching!

@@retrobitstv I could write a very simple ms-dos-only 8086 program for you for testing, if you like. Just the bare minimum of a hello world, so that you can at least see if it works. If that sounds appealing, contact me.

@@JimLeonard Hi Jim, if that's something you would be interested in helping test out I would certainly be happy to give it a try!

I just watched the new season last week! I did see the Kaypro along with an Amiga 1000 and a Tandy 1000!

It's hard to overstate the importance of an 80-column, readable screen and performant I/O for business applications. The C64 had no good options for either. The 128 had 80 columns, but was just as I/O bound as the '64.

@@johnwiggins2395 The 128 was a lot better with regard to disk I/O than the 64. Still not as good as the competition but at least in the same ballpark

I'm not sure I'd go that far. The CP/M side seems decent enough

From what I understand, you need to configure the turbo232 settings to use IRQ instead of NMI and then find a CP/M terminal emulator that supports it (possibly QTerm?). But it appears to be do-able :)

@@retrobitstv the Kermit part was amazing. I always thought it has a very clunky interface(I had to use it on my 8086 to transfer files before buying an xt-ide). The way you used it felt unbelievably natural

@@seisoloumano I was surprised when it just worked more or less on the first try: Kaypro Ubuntu. The only thing I had to fiddle with was enabling flow control to get higher speeds like 9600bps working reliably.

I see what you did there :P

@@retrobitstv My sense of humor is as good as ever, unfortunately.

The world needs more silliness if you ask me :P

@@retrobitstv Indeed, we must dare to be stupid

@@tetsujin_144 It's so easy to do!

I guess I should try it just to see. The Infocom games are largely available natively for CP/M already so I didn't both downloading the DOS versions.

@@retrobitstv True. But since you're trying to get the DOS side of things working, I thought it might be worth a try. Though it's a bit curious that Planetfall didn't work. Don't the DOS versions lean on the ANSI terminal driver? So they should be pretty hardware-agnostic... Maybe it's the ANSI driver itself that's the problem - from the directory listing it looked like it included one of its own...

Yeah the DOS 2.11 disk had a Kaypro-specific ANSI driver for both 24 and 25 line terminals. The DOS 1.25 disk I ended up having to use didn't seem to have such a driver, so I'm sure that was limiting as well.

I was using Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS with "ckermit/bionic,now 302-5.3 amd64". I'm surprised it won't work on 20.04 but I haven't upgraded yet.

@@retrobitstv Thanks for your reply. You might be in for a nasty surprise then. Be warned and read on. I don't know if the Kermit version in Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) works because I couldn't use its package in Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa), which is my current distro. Guess I'll have to try from a "Live" USB Stick. It's even worse in 20.04. There is CKermit and GKermit. GKermit looks weird and most definitely does *not* work. One must install CKermit in Linux. However, CKermit is not included in Debian 10 and therefore not in Ubuntu 20.04. I think that's because the maintainer of Kermit, at hat point in time, changed its website, way of distribution, or something like that. In Debian 10 an antique version from the official Kermit website works (!), but for Ubuntu 20.04 no such luck. I succeeded in compiling Kermit from source code in Ubuntu 20.04 without errors. It starts up. But it'll not work. On older computers: no problem. But 20.04? Forget about it. We classic computer users should verify if CKermit nowadays still works!

That is unfortunate. I wonder what changed between versions? It really should "just work" since it's just ASCII text. Out of curiosity, are you using BASH on 20.04 or ZSH?

I imagine it's going to vary from machine to machine. On my Kaypro, I didn't have to do anything on CP/M except set the baud rate of the RS232 interface to match that of the WiFi modem I had connected. When I launched Kermit, it was immediately able to communicate with the modem with no further setup required. The Kaypro only has a single serial port, for what that's worth. Sorry that's probably not helpful to your case.

@@retrobitstv Thanks. I tried to exchange files via a serial connection (null modem?) between my modern PC and a hobby computer running CP/M. I managed to do so with XModem now. That adds "garbage" at the end of a file as you might know. But luckily it didn't cause the executable file to fail/become corrupt.

Heh yea, whoever owned that particular '84 model appears to have gotten some serious use out of it!

My friend Simon who is into retro machines that are slightly newer than the ones I am into :)

that's not true though. it was _copied_ by Seattle Computer, then *bought* by Microsoft

@@fffUUUUUU You're absolutely right. I totally forgot that.