*********************************************************************** *** *** *** R o m W B W *** *** *** *** Z80/Z180 System Software *** *** *** *********************************************************************** This directory contains a toolset for RomWBW that builds floppy and hard disk media images that can be used on RomWBW by writing the image to a floppy or hard disk (including CF and SD cards). In summary, CP/M files are placed inside of a pre-defined Windows directory structure. A script is then run to create the floppy and hard disk images from the directory tree contents. The resultant images may be copied directly to floppy or hard disk media or used as SIMH emulator disk images. System Requirements ------------------- The scripts run on Microsoft Windows XP or greater (32 and 64 bit variants of Windows are fine). You will need to have Microsoft PowerShell installed. All variants of Windows XP and later support PowerShell. It is included in all versions after Windows XP. If you are using Windows XP, you will need to download it from Microsoft and install it (free download). The cpmtools toolset is used to generate the actual disk images. This toolset is included in the distribution, so you do not need to download or install it. Preparing the Source Directory Contents --------------------------------------- The script expects your files to be found inside a specific directory structure. The structure is: d_xxx --+--> u0 +--> u1 +--> u2 | . | . | . +--> u15 A given disk is reprsented by a directory named d_xxx where xxx can be anything you want. Within the d_xxx directory, the CP/M user areas are represented by subdirectories names u0 thru u15. The files to be placed in the disk image are placed inside of the u0 thru u15 directories depending on which user area you want the file(s) to appear. You do not need to create all of the u## subdirectories, only the ones corresponding to the user areas you want to put files in. To build the disk images, you run the Build.cmd batch file from a command prompt. Build.cmd in turn invokes separate scripts to create the floppy and hard disk images. As distributed, you will see that there are several d_ directories populated with files. If you look at the BuildFD.ps1 and BuildHD.ps1 scripts, you will find that the names of each of these directories is listed. If you want to add a new d_ directory to be converted into a disk image, you will need to add the name of your new directory to this list. Note that each d_ directory may be turned into a floppy image or a hard disk image or both. At present, the scripts assume that the floppy media is 1.44MB. You will need to modify the scripts if you want to create different media. Building the Images ------------------- The image creation process simply traverses the directory structures described above and builds a raw disk image for each floppy disk or hard disk. Note that cpmtools is used to generate the images and is included in the distribution under the Tools directory. The scripts are intended to be run from a command prompt. Open a command prompt and navigate to the Images directory. To build the floppy disk images, use the command "BuildFD". To build the hard disk images, use the command "BuildHD". You can use the command "Build" to build both the floppy and hard disk images in one run. After completion of the script, the resultant image files are placed in the Binary directory with names such as fd_xxx.img and hd_xxx.img. Below is sample output from building the hard disk images: | C:\Users\Wayne\Projects\RBC\Build\RomWBW\Source\Images>BuildHD.cmd | Creating work file... | Creating hard disk images... | Generating Hard Disk cpm3... | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_cpm3.img d_cpm3/u0/*.* 0: | Generating Hard Disk cpm22... | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_cpm22.img d_cpm22/u0/*.* 0: | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_cpm22.img d_cpm22/u1/*.* 1: | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_cpm22.img d_cpm22/u3/*.* 3: | Generating Hard Disk nzcom... | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_nzcom.img d_nzcom/u0/*.* 0: | Generating Hard Disk ws4... | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_ws4.img d_ws4/u0/*.* 0: | Generating Hard Disk zpm3... | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_zpm3.img d_zpm3/u0/*.* 0: | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_zpm3.img d_zpm3/u10/*.* 10: | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_zpm3.img d_zpm3/u14/*.* 14: | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_zpm3.img d_zpm3/u15/*.* 15: | Generating Hard Disk zsdos... | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_zsdos.img d_zsdos/u0/*.* 0: | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_zsdos.img d_zsdos/u1/*.* 1: | cpmcp -f wbw_hd0 hd_zsdos.img d_zsdos/u3/*.* 3: | Moving images into output directory... | C:\Users\Wayne\Projects\RBC\Build\RomWBW\Source\Images\hd_cpm22.img | C:\Users\Wayne\Projects\RBC\Build\RomWBW\Source\Images\hd_cpm3.img | C:\Users\Wayne\Projects\RBC\Build\RomWBW\Source\Images\hd_nzcom.img | C:\Users\Wayne\Projects\RBC\Build\RomWBW\Source\Images\hd_ws4.img | C:\Users\Wayne\Projects\RBC\Build\RomWBW\Source\Images\hd_zpm3.img | C:\Users\Wayne\Projects\RBC\Build\RomWBW\Source\Images\hd_zsdos.img | 6 file(s) moved. | | C:\Users\Wayne\Projects\RBC\Build\RomWBW\Source\Images> Be aware that the script always builds the image file from scratch. It will not update the previous contents. Any contents of a pre-existing image file will be permanently destroyed. Installing Images ----------------- First of all, a MAJOR WARNING!!!! The tools described below are quite capable of obliterating your running Windows system drive. Use with extreme caution and make sure you have backups. To install a floppy image on floppy media, you can use the tool called RaWriteWin. This tool is included in the Tools directory of the distribution. This tool will write your floppy image (fd_xxx.img) to a floppy disk using a raw block transfer. The tool is GUI based and it's operation is self explanatory. To install a hard disk image on a CF card or SD card, you must have the appropriate media card slot on your computer. If you do, you can use the tool called Win32 Disk Imager. This tool is also included in the Tools directory of the distribution. This tool will write your hard disk image (hd_xxx.img) to the designated media card. This tool is also GUI based and self explanatory. Use of the SIMH emulator is outside of the scope of this document. However, if you use SIMH, you will find that you can attach the hard disk images to the emulator with lines such as the following in your SIMH configuration file: | attach hdsk0 hd_cpm22.img | set hdsk0 format=HDSK | set hdsk0 geom=T:520/N:256/S:512 | set hdsk0 wrtenb Making Disk Images Bootable --------------------------- The current generation of these scripts does not make the resultant media bootable. This is primarily because there are multiple choices for what you can put on the boot tracks of the media and that is a choice best left to the user. The simplest way to make a resultant image bootable is to do it from your running CP/M system. Boot your system using the ROM selection, then use the SYSCOPY command to make the desired drive bootable. You would use a command like the following to make drive C bootable: | B>SYSCOPY C:=CPM.SYS Slices ------ A RomWBW CP/M filesystem is fixed at 8MB. This is because it is the largest size filesystem supported by all common CP/M variants. Since all modern hard disks (including SD Cards and CF Cards) are much larger than 8MB, RomWBW supports the concept of "slices". This simply means that you can concatenate multiple CP/M filesystems (up to 256 of them) on a single physical hard disk and RomWBW will allow you to assign drive letters to them and treat them as multiple independent CP/M drives. The disk image creation scripts in this directory will only create a single CP/M file system (i.e., a single slice). However, you can easily create a multi-slice disk image by merely concatenating multiple images together. For example, if you wanted to create a 2 slice disk image that has ZSDOS in the first slice and Wordstar in the second slice, you could use the following command from a Windows command prompt: | C:\RomWBW\Binary>copy /b hd_zsdos.img + hd_ws.img hd_multi.img You can now write hd_multi.img onto your SD or CF Card and you will have ZSDOS in the first slice and Wordstar in the second slice. The concept of slices applies ONLY to hard disks. Floppy disks are not large enough to support multiple slices. Disk Images ----------- RomWBW comes with several disk images. These disk images are created from this directory using the process described above. This is a brief description of the disk images: cpm22 - DRI CP/M 2.2 (Floppy and Hard Disk) Standard DRI CP/M 2.2 distribution files along with a few commonly used utilities. zsdos - ZCPR1 + ZSDOS 1.1 (Floppy and Hard Disk) Contains ZCPR1 and ZSDOS 1.1. This is roughly equivalent to the ROM boot contents, but provides a full set of the applications are related files that would not all fit on the ROM drive. nzcom - NZCOM (Floppy and Hard Disk) Standard NZCOM distribution. Note that you will need to run the NZCOM setup before this will run properly. You will need to refer to the NZCOM documentation. cpm3 - DRI CP/M3 (Floppy and Hard Disk) Standard DRI CP/M 3 adaptation for RomWBW that is ready to run. It can be started by running CPMLDR. zpm3 - ZPM3 (Floppy and Hard Disk) Simeon Cran's ZCPR 3 compatible OS for CP/M 3 adapted for RomWBW and ready to run. It can be started by running CPMLDR (which seems wrong, but ZPMLDR is somewhat broken). ws4 - WorkStar 4 (Floppy and Hard Disk) Micropro Wordstar 4 full distribution. bp - BPBIOS (Hard Disk only) Adaptation of BPBIOS for RomWBW. This is not complete and NOT useable in it's current state. Notes ----- I realize these instructions are very minimal. I am happy to answer questions. You will find the RetroBrew Computers Forum at https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/forum/ to be a great source of information as well.