CP/M On a TRS-80 Model 100 - REXCPM

[@oprion]

>i You are carrying: A portable TRS-80. A Serial cable. A shiny laptop from the distant future loaded with custom goodies. No tea.

[@JacquesMayhoff]

This is what your grandmother hears when you talk her through sending an email over the phone

[@BlackTarH]

why would you use email with a phone?

[@ToTheGAMES]

@@BlackTarH yes

[@tellurian2263]

The patience that Shelby displays with these retro tech tangents is superhuman! I remember how painful this was back in the day and would never willingly subject myself to that experience again... watching Shelby do it, however, is surprisingly soothing ;)

[@bikeforever2016]

That is both hilariously and distressingly convoluted. Congratulations on getting it working 🤣

[@AWalYT]

Built a bunch of REX modules a few years back during a board sale drought (before the CP/M ones existed), and would still recommend anyone with a 100/102 getting one simply for being able to save and restore the RAM contents safely. Happy to see more people getting their mitts on these kind of modules.

[@rofbungle8572]

Great work navigating that Kafkaesque process! Way beyond me, I'm afraid. CP/M on one of my Apple IIs is my preferred method - install a card then boot a floppy that's easily made with ADT Pro. Up and running in no time at all, and no need to source the tears of a Cobol developer or Alan Turing to lubricate the ROM socket, calculate the stack address (whatever that is) with Babbage's difference engine or the Antikythera mechanism or the large Hadron collider in CERN (but only even addresses that aren't divisible by 57 or whatever its hex or binary equivalents are), and then recite incantations in assembly code, but backwards, to make it work. For us retro fiends who aren't IT professionals by day, some of this stuff is just baffling sorcery, but nevertheless terribly interesting! It's like a digital Alice In Wonderland.

[@derekchristenson5711]

How timely! I just got a Tandy 102 in a local thrift shop along with a book for $7. Before even powering it up, I looked up some info about it (such as the original manual) and immediately came across the page for REXCPM... and was immediately baffled by much of what I read. I've used CP/M on my Apple IIe with Z80 co-pro card, as well as a few other computers, so the idea interests me, but this sounds like the most complicated CP/M experience I've ever seen (and that includes one hobbyist board I have that required some custom BIOS modification). I'm still a little baffled why it doesn't use a mix of Flash and RAM so that CP/M (and probably a few user programs) could be stored in Flash while still having a nice amount of SRAM available, but maybe the choice will make more sense once I read up on this little machine. I'm also still in the dark as to what a "REX device" is, but I'm sure that's explained somewhere I just need to find. Hopefully, the one I picked up still works, of course. For $7, I figured it was worth it even if it requires a lot of work, though!

[@Teklynk-t2q]

I have a Model 100 and have been looking for the compatible barcode reader/scanner for it. The 100 was used a lot back in the day for ordering and inventory. I remember working at a place that had a 3 ring binder full of tabbed pages with barcodes. Find the barcode for the item and scan it to add it to model 100's ordering program. At some point a manger would take the 100 and export the data to a PC to fullfill the orders. Since the 100 is portable, it made it easy to take it into a warehouse, freezer, stock room and scan barcodes for inventory purposes. I thought it would be cool to do some project using barcodes, a scanner and the Model 100. Would be funny to use it in IT for asset tracking and inventory since typically asset tags are barcodes or they can be.

[@whatskenmaking]

Glad to see other folks giving some spotlight to REXCPM. I also did a REXCPM installation tutorial video last year - it certainly isn't easy - kzbin.info/www/bejne/m4u0fZaKorxkqac. One of the guys in the Tandy community also made a battery backup board for the REXCPM so you can keep it in long term storage without losing the data. I have a few of those boards leftover from when I built it - if you want one, I'd be happy to send one over to you.

[@hangonsnoop]

It was very classy featuring Infocom games in this video.

[@pikgears]

I mean, what else do you do wtih cp/m?

[@808v1]

just finished restoring my M100 and am looking for some system/hardware upgrades to do - perfect timing!!

[@Cassandra_Johnson]

I'm a bit surprised no one has just created a replacement rom will all this pre-installed. Pretty sure no one would miss a few of the apps already there.

[@JD-xt8cj]

When I was in middle school, our gym teacher had one of these. No idea what he used it for

[@snegglederlickton1637]

ascii-based brazilian fart fetish porn

[@TedSeeber]

Probably attendance

[@kurtwinter4422]

Sports bookmaking

[@Vladimir-hq1ne]

Oh just imagine booting DEC from the tape... Those CP/M boots were a pice of cake ;)

[@CaptainCattywampus]

What next? Xenix on the model 100 with a serial terminal? Just kidding, but that would be kinda cool!

[@hotkeymuc]

I experimentally managed to run CP/M on a VTech Learning Computer! 😊Once you have RAM mounted at the start of address space, any Z80 CPU will happily run CP/M, I found out. But the GL4000 only has 20x4 screen, which makes "ZORK" pretty hard to play 😅

[@MAn-wv5go]

This was so cool. Thank you very much. 😊

[@MxArgent]

The devterm sounds kind of exciting as a modern successor to the Model 100, but it's physically smaller and from what I hear the battery life doesn't really cut it.

[@Gh0sTlyD3th]

From what I understand, the TRS-80 Model 100 is nearly identical to the NEC PC-8201. Would this work with it as well, or is it designed ONLY to work with the TRS-80 Model 100

[@rawr51919]

it might, only way to know would be to try it out and see if no other info exists

[@garyweber8201]

Sadly, no, the REXCPM is not compatible with the NEC PC-8201 for a few reasons related to both the hardware & software of the system itself. Steve (the creator) has a design on paper for the NEC, but it isn't a reality quite yet.

[@JeffTiberend]

That's way cool. I wonder if Wordstar will run on it. Okay. Question answered. LOL

[@XiaosChannel]

10:48 "this was a little different of a video for me to make..." well some might call this a "tangent"

[@yordan_ganev]

respect for fellow cutecom user

[@hololightful]

What is the difference between the rex# and the rexcpm? It kind of looks like it just ups the storage space and uses SRAM instead of flash? Why couldn't you make a rex# with a larger flash chip. Then you'd get non volitile storage AND cpm?

[@root42]

I think CP/M also requires the extra memory? The Model 100 comes with 32K at most. So I guess it also gives you all the RAM that CP/M needs. Would be nice to have both SRAM and flash on there...

[@galeng73]

Man, my memory sucks. I'm pretty sure I used one of these when I was a journalist back in my grad school days. Also, that job paid very poorly. They did provide the device and MODEM.

[@Hiraghm]

It's a shame that you can't (as far as I know) use the Ultimate ROM with RexCPM... then you could use View80 and at least have a 60 column display. That takes you up into the realm of the trs-80 model 1, anyway.

[@kelli217]

Does this system work with the DVI (Disk/Video Interface)? That at least presents an 80x25 screen. Which might make some programs work better.

[@graealex]

What distro and DE are you using?

[@jsalsman]

I had FORTH on a Model 100! It was a terrible experience!

[@GeorgeTsiros]

Because FORTH, or because TR80?

[@jsalsman]

@@GeorgeTsiros firstly, all FORTH libraries and the language itself assumes a 16x64 screen, and is excruciating to try to use in 8x40. But other than and probably because of that, the implementation was really poor.

[@Izavos]

Friends, I have some questions. Are all software that runs on CPM/80 on Z80 compatible? Is Dbase that runs on Apple's CPM// compatible with TRS80's CPM? Is it enough to copy between computers? Why hasn't RadioShack released an M100 that natively runs CPM/80?

[@andrewdunbar828]

I'm working on reverse engineering software for fun for retro systems and want to add a loader for the CP/M binary executable format and object file format if there is one. I'm looking for documentation on the format, a binary to test with, and preferably another disassembler to compare against. (Z80 I can do, just want to get CP/M specifics right.)

[@JohnDlugosz]

3:04 The dollar sign goes to the _left_ of the digits! It's $80, not "80$".

[@ricardog2165]

Just for fun, try running dBase on it 🤭

[@SB-qm5wg]

Wow, that's super complicated.

[@andresbravo2003]

So very common huh?

[@Vladimir-hq1ne]

BTW - CP-M had NO WAY in other than 7-bit filenames.

[@wotsac]

Oh, wait, lol... yeah, wordstar definitely wouldn't

[@ductam-wj9dt]

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