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Comment by nineteen999 | Hacker News Reader

> Porting a CP/M BIOS is a nice engineering and assembly language challenge for anyone willing to take it on, depending on their hardware environment.

In my case I decided the hardware environment was going to be hosted inside Unreal Engine:

https://i.imgur.com/5MDfwKg.png

It's crazy easy to get CP/M running on just about anything with Z80 CPU emulation, and some glue logic to handle reading bytes from a keyboard I/O port, and sending them to a terminal, and reading/writing sectors from a block device. I had to write a VT100 emulator for UE4 but that doesn't take too much work.

WordStar:

https://i.imgur.com/rIY1he8.png

A telnet client (complete with ZMODEM) for accessing BBS's on the Internet:

https://i.imgur.com/aSc9VGL.png

Zork I and Rogue:

https://i.imgur.com/gnOCp3e.png

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Extremely cool. It'd be fun to play with machines from this era in VR and have them exist with huge glass terminals like this. It makes them feel so immense compared to what they actually were (small tabletop computers).

I'd love to go back and work on it more, I wanted to have both Z80/6502 based systems, just like the 8-bit wars of the 80's, but with networking. I couldn't decide between "1980's in space" or a post apocalyptic world where only 8-bit computers were robust enough to function. Maybe one day.

This is great! Reminds me of Notch's post Minecraft game that never got off the ground, 0x10c.

It was very much inspired by that, yes.

For me, Turbo Pascal was always the killer app for CP/M, though Wordstar & VisiCalc are probably more important overall.

I still play around with Turbo Pascal on CP/M a lot for fun - it is a shockingly good development environment (even on a 4 MHz CPU my edit/compile/debug loop is usually <10 seconds, which is pretty fast even by modern standards). And it could all trivially fit in the L1 cache of a modern CPU.

I haven't tested Turbo Pascal on it, since i'm not a Pascal programmer, but the HiTech-C compiler runs and creates working executables, its not a stretch that Turbo Pascal would either.

Ummm...why would there be any doubt Turbo Pascal can create working executables?

Why would there be an assumption I have implemented all the emulation completely and correctly enough for it to run?

If it doesn't, there's a bug in my emulator, end of story. I have had to implement all kinds of things to make various software work correctly, and there's probably still more to do.

Why would you assume I'm talking about your emulator. I just said I liked Turbo Pascal.

Oh. I see. I was talking about in the context of my UE4 Z80 emulator, the top post in this thread :-) no biggie.

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