80-Bus News

Recently, feeling rich, I sent off to Henry’s for BDOSZ, CCPZ and their Incredible CP/M Utilities Disk. Having used them now for a month or so I thought a few comments on how I found them might be interesting.

I expected BDOSZ to have lots of free space to add extra goodies, but it didn’t. I feel this shows how compact 8080 code can be. Now that BDOSZ is installed in my system, I am only aware of the change when I run out of disk space or get a select error. There’s not much more to say about it except that it’s nice to be able to look through the code when you want to find something out.

CCPZ, on the other hand, has had a fundamental effect on my way of working. For a start, all my commonly used programs (e.g. PIP, SUBMIT, ERQ etc.) now reside on drive A and I do all my work on drive B with a disk for each activity (Pascal, assembler, correspondence etc.). I use Gemini’s “Auto Execute” facility to log in drive B on reset and although most programs are to be found on drive A, it only takes a second for CCPZ to determine that the file is not on drive B. Files are transferred from one working disk to another via drive A. I have patched SUBMIT and EXSUB to put the $$$.SUB file on drive A where CCPZ expects to find it and Wordstar to find its overlay files there too.

Initially there was a problem with CCPZ as after the first warm boot, all I got was the message:

Wrong system size/No system on this disk

I have Gemini Bios vers 2.2 2-DM and I traced the problem to the code at BIOS+E3H where it compares the byte at CCP+4 to E0H which it is in the original CCP, I changed this test to comparing CCP+3 to C3H (jp).

I can’t leave the subject of CCPZ without saying that I find all the new facilities incredibly useful. Its a bit like the TV Times, I didn’t realise you could get so much in it!

Finally to Henry’s Incredible Utilities. These are a mixed bag, some being extremely useful. Although some of the programs have been mentioned before in the magazine, I have never seen a review of the entire contents before. The programs come in source form or as COM files (some as both) and there is so much on the disk that all the sources are in compressed form but by following the directions all can be retrieved.

The disk contains the following programs:

1. Cataloguing suite
2. COMP (file compare program)
3. CPU (Z80 processor test)
4. Program dating suite (Its all done using bit 7 of the letters in the file name)
5. CRC (File CRC generation)
6. DU (Disk patch utility)
7. ERQ (Selective erase)
8. FILEMAP (Displays file maps)