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       Misc. Thoughts, (circumlunar), 09/05/2018
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I emailed  Dan Cross over  at grex.org, as grex  is entirely
down (and  has been for  a couple days.) Apparently  a storm
knocked out some  critical hardware at the  telco level, and
things are  expected to be  back online today.  That reminds
me,  I  haven't downloaded  a  backup  of my  content  there
recently...

Normally I confine  my entirely random ramblings  to my grex
gopher  hole... I  think.  But, that  gopher  hole has  been
blocked.  How  do people  get  rid  of gophers  these  days?
Smoke? Dynamite?  Poisoned grubs? In any  case, lacking any
reasonable analogy, it's just down, so I'm writing here.

Circumlunar.space is a fun place. If you somehow stumbled on
this gopher  hole, take a look  at the url, then  come visit
and  get  a shell  account. There's a  fledgling BBS  at the
command line,  limited resources, and an  interesting sci-fi
theme. You belong here if you're reading this.

Over at grex  I've been writing about my  latest z80 project
progress. I  started with  breadboard z80 (the  Grant Searle
designs)  and then  did a  prototype board  version, and  am
currently working with a  pcb version (Herman's board layout
based on Grant's design.) I'm up and running with 64K of ram
and 128MB of  Compact Flash storage in 16  drives (A:-P:) of
8MB each. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

The system  runs CP/M  2.2 (my loose  theme here!)  I didn't
really use  CP/M when I  was younger- my first  computer use
was in  the school computer lab  on Apple IIs, and  my first
home  computer had  an early  version of  DOS. My  first z80
computer builds (the breadboard  ones) all had ROM-BASIC and
cassette storage (you  can see the plans I used  over at grex
when it comes back online if you  want), so the step up to a
real disk  OS that  can run programs  has been  wonderful :)
It's all  relative; I'm glad that  I had a bad  time getting
the Compact  Flash version  working for so  long (I  had two
bad/fake  z80 SIO/2  chips,) because  it forced  me to  poke
around with the ROM-BASIC  versions. Appreciation, it seems,
is often relative.

I guess what I'm trying to  say is, CP/M might not seem like
the best  OS in the  world, but  it's amazing compared  to a
system with only ROM-BASIC.

On  my  CP/M  setup,   I  have  WordStar,  CalcStar,  mbasic
(BASIC-80),  lots of  old  .BAS files,  the  TE text  editor
(which  is in  active development,  whew) plus  a few  other
utilities, and  a couple games (ladder  and something else.)
My z80  SBC needs a terminal;  I use a Briel  PockeTerm with
the ajvTerm ROM (for better ANSI/VT100 support). The ajvTerm
ROM makes  the thing far  more reliable;  it used to  drop a
ton  of characters.  ANSI/VT  emulation  has, however,  been
difficult. I had to manually  patch WordStar (which was fun,
what a cool program,) and find the right setting for Ladder.
Unfortunately,  I  couldn't  get  Ladder to  work  with  the
PockeTerm, but  it *does* work perfectly  when I'm connected
to  a  minicom session...  so,  the  ajvTerm isn't  perfect.
CalcStar is setup  for VT52, which also  needs minicom right
now (and a correct TERM setting.)

Next up in this little project is to modify the ajvTerm ROM.
I want to add  a config option in the popup  menu to let the
user (me) swap between VT100, VT52, and "raw". The PockeTerm
is based on the Parallax  Propeller chip, and I've got their
development environment  setup and working. Now,  to find or
make the time to mess with  it. The VT52 and VT100 codes are
well  documented,  and  the  ajvTerm  code  is  very  clear.
Hopefully I'll be able to  fit everything easily in the ROM,
and hopefully the speed/reliability won't suffer.