I was talking to Derek of Extreme Kits at the RC2014 Assembly 2.0 about having to underclock the Pico 2 for the MZ-80K and MZ-80A emulations in the Pico MZ. Derek has the opposite problem on the Pico RomWBW, as it doesn't run quite as quickly as a real RC2014.
A new year and I'm back to tinkering with the Pico MZ-80K emulator. I've started work on support for the RC2014's RP2040 VGA terminal card. I'd not had very much luck with it last year, but I'm now making decent progress thanks to a closer examination of the picoterm firmware…
It's 42 years since Computing Today first published The Valley. It set a new standard for magazine type-in games as the code is designed to be portable, well structured and comprehensively documented. Perhaps most importantly it is very playable, with lots of scope for writing extensions to the core game.
Another note to self rather than anything else - a PuTTY version 0.78 configuration that works well for an RC2014 running CP/M from the Micro SD card and SIO/2 module (Somehow this selection of modules seems fussier than the Compact Flash module paired with the MC68B50 - but this configuration…
A week ago I noticed that I had a problem with my CBASIC prime number generator running on an RC2040. My first thought was that I'd messed up the algorithm (not unheard of) as it told me there were 1,231 primes between 1 and 10,000 (there are 1,229). Eventually I…
Update: 06/01/2026 Something seems to have changed in the way the Raspberry Pi sets up serial ports by default between the time I wrote this article and later versions of Raspberry Pi OS (bookworm) through to the current release (trixie). After a lot of experimentation, the following method now appears…
After my post on Turbo Pascal et al, someone suggested that I try using the Digital Research CBASIC compiler - so I have done! The CBASIC dialect seems like a mashup of ideas from other BASICs, FORTRAN and Pascal. For example, line numbers are only required if they're going to…
It's now the end of January and I'm still obsessed. Not so much with the Advent of Code problems themselves, but seeing what solutions might look like in other languages under CP/M 2.2. The two languages I've tried so far are the FTL (HiSoft) Modula-2 compiler, version 1.30 and Manx…