6502.org

I am Rich Leary, the developer of DOS/65. I started developing DOS/65 about 35 years ago and have off and on as the years have past made improvements and upgrades to the product. Within the past two years some fairly significant developments have been made but that news has only been distributed to a limited number of potential users. What I'm trying to do with this post is make as much of the 6502 user community as possible aware of what is available.

I do not have my own website and hence have no efficient way of distributing information. Many of you have probably seen the short entry on this site which then links to Peter Dassow's site where he was kind enough to let me post some files and documentation some years back. That information is now out of date and certainly would require significant supplementing to bring it up to speed.

What is posted on that site are for V2.1 but are not current releases for V2.1. They certainly do not reflect release over year ago of V3.0. V3.0 brought DOS/65 up a notch in comparison to its role model of CP/M. For example V3.0 adds 16 numbered user areas to every disk device and the ability to do batch processing.

In the past few months I focused on producing a version of DOS/65 V3 that can run from a read-only memory (ROM). To prove the concept I've implemented the ROM version on two different platforms. The first is the WDC W65C02SXB and the second is Daryl Rictor's SBC2. In both cases I built an auxiliary board using Andre Fachat's VIA-based SPI interface design. Both platforms are up and running with a micro-SD card as the storage media. Each system has four 8 MB drives provided by the micro-SD card. The interfaces are implemented as four layer printed circuit boards from Express PCB. Because the connector configuration on the two platforms are slightly different each is a unique interface.

As has been the case for several years, all of the software and hardware design information is free.

My question to the forum is this: is there some way I could obtain some space to store for public access the software releases including documentation and the hardware design and fabrication data. information?

Thanks,

Rich Leary

Yes. Contact Mike Naberezny, the owner of this site, whose email address is at the bottom of this page, and he can post it for you. It would be great to have this publicly accessible! Thanks.

Will do.

Thanks,

Rich

I'm looking at http://www.z80.eu/dos65.html now. Is the problem that somehow you don't have access anymore to update it? I've had it linked on my 6502-oriented site for some time (I have no idea when or where I got the link), about 40% of the way down my links page, about 25 or 30 lines below the heading "65 software:..." I want to keep it current. Thanks.

What is on Peter's site is mostly associated with the C64 release. Since his site is focused on processors other than the 6502 maintaining that as the primary site does not make much sense to me. I woould rather his site point to 6502.org.

The information is more closely aligned with 6502.org including the specific SBC interfaces, the VIA interfaces, and the 6502 software design in general.

Rich

One option would be to use github.com - a huge, searchable repository for open source projects. You can upload your source code there as a tree rather than ZIP files. People can browse through the source, and clone the tree if they'd like to use it or contribute. You'd maintain control. And it's all free.

It uses the git source control system, which I only just recently started using at a new job. It's fairly straightforward to pick up.

There are already a number of 6502-related projects on there.

If you do use github, I hope you'll make things easier to find than most people have it. I never can find what I'm looking for in people's github pages. It is so frustrating! They also have a gray (instead of black) font, and that really slows my reading down. Sometimes you also need longer lines than github gives. The idea is good, but I find these and lots of other problems with github.

Doing it instead as html pages lets you mix photos and diagrams in, videos, better formatting, etc.. sections that are specifically code can be bracketed with <pre> and </pre> (for "pre-formatted and monospaced"). If someone wants to use it, they can still copy and paste, and the pre-formatted part will have the intended white space preserved, it's searchable, etc.. It's just that others cannot directly submit changes. People who don't want to learn html put up plain text pages which works too, albeit with some pretty severe limitations.

I think Mike is more than happy to host projects, but I do also like github - not only can it host the source, but also host a website, and a wiki, and an issue tracker. One could even do both!

In any case, cool to hear that it's still being updated! Though one feature I'd ask for: please, please make it simple to access files across user areas! CP/M never seemed to have a standard for this that I could discern, and as far as I know you couldn't, say, be working in user area 3 and access a file in user area 4 without major shenanigans.

Some interesting alternatives. I have not heard back from Mike yet. I think that input will be key.

The comments about user areas are spot on. Right now user areas are handled the same as in the basic CP/M 2.2. That is to say they are handled very simply and crudely.

I have thought about alternative approaches in which the command processor (CCM) would be significantly enhanced to allow user areas to be part of the file descriptor. CCM would then allow a command line such as the following:

a0:copy b1:test.asm a3:

I also think it reasonable to set a default search path, E. G., if a given file is not found in the current user area then search a specified path. It might be as simple as always starting a search in user area zero of drive a.

Yeah, if the OS-level filesystem facility handled that, it'd be perfectly fine - the problem with CP/M is that (as far as I know) the only support for such an extended descriptor is application-specific, which in practice means that it's never there when you need it.

You are correct. There are things that could be accomplished along this line just by modifying CCM but full implementation would require changes in both the individual applications as well as possibily the Primitive Execution Module (PEM). Adding the code to parse an entry such as "B6:" versus current capability to handle an entry like "B:" is not terribly difficult. The real pain wwould be modifying the application to do the same thing once it's turned on.

The good news is every application does not have to be modified at once. Incremental enhancement of applications should be the norm not the exception.

The other good news is that the user community can implement changes as it sees fit. As long as PEM remains stable applications can be modified in any way desired with no impact to other applications or to CCM.

Absolutely. I'll contact you via email and we'll work out the details.

Found this independently but noticed BigEd also linked to this via a post on past "mos6502" postings for October. I missed it.:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4973&p=57121&hilit=dos65#p57121

Here's the link:

http://retro.hansotten.nl/dos65/dos65-the-system/

Cheers!
Andy

(I think that's DOS65, Andy, not DOS/65 - two different projects! Both worth a look, I'm sure.)