On 14 Mar 2024, poindexter FORTRAN said the following...
fusion wrote to anthk <=-
this is so cool. i always wanted to build a pc from scratch.. though suppose what i really always meant when i thought about it was to bui a motherboard and all that myself.. that guy is next level!
I'm tempted by some of these CP/M homebrew kits out there - I don't know
if anyone made an offline reader for CP/M, though. That would be the
one thing I'd need in a text-mode computer.
so i was going to post about how the qwk format is pretty simple .. so you could probably whip one up.. but then i got it into my head to prove it
myself heh. i got it to the point it can read some messages with a little
help from unzip and an emulator so it's pretty artifical but:
## CP/M emulator
https://github.com/jhallen/cpm
since it's obviously not a real machine, the extent of my verification is "authentic turbo pascal 3.0a for CPM-80 works on it .."
you can just run ./cpm after it's compiled and CP/M will "see" whatever is in the current directory.
## turbo pascal 3.01A
https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-pascal/3x
i unzipped the disk01.zip into a folder and then moved the cpm emulator
binary into that folder.
you run the tinst program and for the terminal select ADM 3A and select
NO when it asks if you want to "modify this definition", then set the
operating frequency to 4. then you can just quit tinst.
when you run 'turbo', you can press Y to include error messages (seems we
have enough ram..) then press E to select the file. it'll drop you into the editor. the editor isn't great. press Ctrl-K then D to drop back to the menu. now you can press O then C to make turbo generate .COM files, and then Q to
go back to the main menu. finally press C to compile.
i have a feeling crap like that is why turbo pascal 4 was a rewrite.. sadly this one is the last to support CP/M.
## qwkread.pas!
https://kirin.dcclost.com/~alex/qwkread.zip
to test you'll need a MESSAGES.DAT file from inside your QWK file (it's
just a zip file) in the same folder.
currently it scans through the whole MESSAGES.DAT file as if it were one huge message base. enter/space/n goes to the next message, p for previous, q to quit, etc
it looks like there's an unzip for CP/M here:
https://github.com/agn453/UNZIP-CPM-Z80
but i didn't test it. with that and a dialup/telnet terminal of some sort
it should be possible to read messages now :)
.. assuming it works on a real machine
Alex
--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
* Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi