There is a problem with the disk. The images of system diskettes are in the ATR format, which forces the first three sectors to be 128 bytes long. The original diskettes had 256 bytes in each of them. The second halves of sectors 1-3 were lost during coping. Fortunately, the missing data belongs to hardware-independent modules of the CP/M system. I have successfully restored them, basing on other distributions of CP/M. Additionally it turned out, that the first sector didn't need any changes. There is still a problem how to put the missing data into the sectors 2 and 3, since Atari expects just 128 bytes in them.
The solution is the Indus CP/M Tool, which fills the missing parts of the boot sectors, using programmability features of Indus/LDW//CA drives. One should start with fixing the Indus RAM Charger Utility Disk (the other Indus CP/M system disks contain an older BIOS). The procedure is as follows:
If you succesfully booted CP/M you can create a new system disk with CP/M's INIT program.
An alternative approach (the initial one described once on this page) requires a PC running MS-DOS with a 5,25 360kB drive. Using Anadisk software (version 2.06 worked for me), fill the missing parts of sectors 2 and 3 with data from this dump (leave sector 1 intact).
There is a READ.ME file on the system disk, containing the description of Indus CP/M. The contents of the READ.ME file can be seen by issuing TYPE READ.ME or clicking below:
It is no general CP/M manual, but you can find one here (version 2.2 is appropriate).
CP/M works best with two or more disk drives. So it is convenient to use as D2: either a second drive or a SIO2PC device.
Many CP/M programs require setting the terminal model for proper screen handling. In our case, we should choose the ADM-3A (Lear-Siegler) for 80-column mode and ADM-31 for 40-column, since these models of terminals are emulated by E and F programs (they say about TRM80 and TRM40 programs in the document, but this is apparently a mistake).
Download TT - Trub Terminal 0.6
How to get ASCII characters that are not present on Atari keyboard:
Character | Key |
---|---|
{ | SHIFT < |
} | SHIFT > |
` | Inverse |
~ | SHIFT Inverse |
Wordstar on TT VBXE terminal screen
Programs for CP/M can be easily found in the Internet. However, it can be hard for beginners to copy them on a diskette and to run. Here is a possible way to create a new CP/M disk and to store the files on it:
Indus CP/M system running on the LDW drive
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