CP/M is Back On                                               05/18/24
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I got the  old Grant Searle CP/M machine running  again today[1]. This
one is  built on  a PCB  designed by Herman[2],  with the  optional CF
board. I'm not a  huge fan of the PCB setup  (especially the CF board,
which just kind of hangs off in  space and has no mounting holes), but
it works.

My old 128MB CF  card has been sitting in there,  and appears to still
be working fine. I had a little bit of a time recalling how the serial
ports were supposed to be set up, but I finally got that going. It's a
bit of a mess, but that's alright.

For a terminal, I use a Briel Pocketterm[3] that I've had for ages. It
has a  custom ROM by SDF  user ajv, which I've  customized further. My
version allows  switching between  VT100, VT52,  and Raw  modes, which
suits my  purposes in CP/M quite  well. I have an  ESP32 FabGL deal[4]
that I'd like  to use as a terminal, but  I haven't bothered soldering
up a serial port to it yet.

The keyboard is an  old PS/2 keyboard from a Sony  Vaio. It's a little
stylized, but  has that old  90's keyboard  feel. Maybe it's  from the
early 2000's, but it works.

First thing I ran was Ladder[5], which is quite a fun little game (and
blazing  fast!). Back  when  you  couldn't download  10k  games in  an
afternoon, they  made them much  harder to master.  I also fired  up a
tetris clone, Quatris, a text  editor called te, Wordstar, MBasic, and
a  few  other things.  I  had  previously  written some  mbasic  "cls"
commands for vt100 and vt52, and I  tested those as well. Tested a few
other things (calculator, and I can't recall what else) as well.

From my files, I recall that back in the day I was working hard to get
serial communications working  between this and my linux PC.  I have a
slew of comm  programs, but I seem to recall  not having great success
getting them to work  right. I'll have to pick that  up and try again.
One of the core  things I want out of a retro  computer is the ability
to get information in  and out of it. I believe I  have some CP/M disk
utilities to manage the CF from linux (somewhere around here), but I'd
prefer to have I/O from the running device if possible.

(an old trick I  used to use gwbasic or qbasic,  available on most DOS
setups,  to write  a quick  and dirty  file transfer  program for  the
serial port. I'd immediately transfer the program FastLynx 2.0[6] so I
could  transfer anything  else I  wanted with  ease. That,  of course,
doesn't apply here.)

Next steps with this thing, for now, will probably be some more serial
comms  experimenting, followed  by some  writing in  the editors.  The
machine  is perfectly  usable for  writing, of  course. And  some more
games (I don't think I ever got aliens to work on this thing...)

[1] http://searle.x10host.com/cpm/index.html
[2] https://oshwlab.com/Herman/Grant_Searle_CPM_System-4rpLJZaYk
[3] http://retro.hansotten.nl/6502-sbc/apple-1/replica-1-briel/pocketerm/
[4] https://www.lilygo.cc/products/fabgl-vga32
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_(video_game)
[6] https://winworldpc.com/product/fastlynx/2x