On 5/13/20 4:01 AM, Erik van der Tier wrote:
Hi,
I’ve just installed LaddieAlpha on my Mac. At first this didn’t work, as the
runtime that came with the package was too old for my Mac. However, a quick
trip to the Mono website fixed that issue. When installing the Mono environment
I almost fell of my chair. The install takes up over 1GB of disk space… 1GB!
And that to run a 320MB+ diskemulator! Now don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy
that I can now exchange files directly from the Mac (first I was using DosBox +
DeskLink). But still… 1.3GB of space just to emulate a diskdrive… Even the
entire VirtualT Mac version is only 4.4MB.
It truly boggles my mind! This is exactly what for me is the appeal of these
old machines like the M100… you could do quite a bit of work with so little
resources.
Now Mono is likely an extreme example the other extreme… I develop a
Knowledge/Database platform in Rust and the current release build takes only
3.7Mb of space (for a complete database platform and this doesn’t require any
other dependencies at all, except a base OS). So it is possible to still do a
lot with relatively little resource demands, but still it sometimes amazes me.
Anyway, this all makes it all the more fun to keep these old baddies working
and do some good old Assembler coding talking straight to the iron.
Cheers,
Erik
This is why I usually use dlplus.
Also because I use the bootstrapper about as much as the tpdd server
itself, and Laddie does not include a bootstrapper.
https://github.com/bkw777/dlplus
John maintained and added some work to that before writing Laddie so we
can thank him for both. And dlplus doesn't support subdirectories yet
while Laddie does. I think mComm does too.
Last year I picked it up and added(*) a bootstrapper and made it a fully
flexible one where it actually can send anything you like not just a
particular dos installer, and now comes pre-packaged with a few versions
of TEENY and DSKMGR. In total it has included tpdd client installers for
M100/102, T200, MC-10, KC-85, and NEC. The loaders already existed I
just scrounged them up out of archives and collected them into one spot
and made it easy to inject them. And both the loader.ba files and the
installation instructions to go with them are external files, not baked
into the executable itself.
(*) It already had a bootstrapper, but it didn't work as far as I could
tell, and even if it had worked, I didn't agree with the design for how
it was invoked. And no one seemed to be using it or care, so I removed
it and did it the way I wanted. I think I will eventually put back
something similar to the original method though, because that way would
let me implement the same thing in Arduino, so you could have a
mechanism that worked the same way from the M100 regardless if the
server was dlplus on a pc or sd2tpdd on a Teensy.
And I haven't tried it myself yet but there is also a python tpdd
server, with bootstrapper.
http://www.club100.org/memfiles/index.php?&direction=0&order=&directory=Kurt%20McCullum/mComm%20Python
There are even more options outside of general PC's & OS's
Android
http://www.club100.org/memfiles/index.php?&direction=0&order=&directory=Kurt%20McCullum/mComm%20Android
Arduino
https://github.com/bkw777/SD2TPDD
(really comes from Jimmy Petit https://github.com/TangentDelta/SD2TPDD
but I've hacked on it somewhat to port it to a few different boards that
have the sd card reader already built in, and the adafruit boards even
have built-in lipo charger, and to add frills like power saving sleep
calls, current subdirectory display in TS-DOS, disk activity light)
--
bkw
