Recenty I stumpled multipe times upon a certain name. It was Gary Kildall. Gary was the one, who founded Digital Research. The company who was well known for its operating  system CP/M, designed for smaller computers. In a time where mainframes were more common, than a personal computer. Some people might rember DR DOS, which was an interesting alternative to MS Dos. Many people called in wrongly Digital Research. The company who was well known for its operating  system CP/M, designed for smaller computers. In a time where mainframes were more common, than a personal computer. Some people might rember DR DOS, which was an interesting alternative to MS Dos. Many people called in wrongly Dr. Dos, because they never heard about a company named Digital Research.

I have learned a lot about Micrisoft and Apples history, but never looked into the history of CP/M and the company and people who created it. After some webresearch I found an interesting episode of the TV show Computer Chronicles. It was a Gary Kildall special, which was broadcasted after his sudden death and gave an voerview about his life and all his achievements.
 Computer Chronicles and Archive.org are already quite interesting finds. I never used Archive.org before. There are tons of ancient episodes of Computer Chronicles. It was exciting to see reviews about C64, AMIGA 1000 or the Apple II. A lot of celebrities from the Bits & Bytes world have shown up at Computer Chronicles. So its a must see. Gary was always a part of Computer Chronicles as being the co-host. He was one of the most important inventors in Computer history. But most people don't know him.

For Gary, it was not easy not to be recognized for his work from the world. Especially because others did a lot. One of them of course still is Bill Gates. When Gates started the deal with IBM, selling MS-Dos to big blue, he basically sold a 1:1 copy of CP/M. I knew that a copy of the CP/M manual from Radio Shack, was the germ cell of QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), which Gates sold as MS-Dos. What I didn't kew was, that MS-Dos 1.0 was binary compatible to CP/M! At that time and maybe even later, Gary didn't complain about that. That Microsoft was able to get QDos, all credit goes to the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Yes, its not only Gates who made Microsoft.

Later Microsoft was not excited about DR Dos. So they successfully managed to put some obstacles into Digital Resarchs way. They integrated a "bug" into Windows 3.1/3.11, to ensure that Windows can't run in it's 386 extend mode, when its launched from DR Dos. Gary was this time willing to fight for his right in court. It took years to finally win, but it was too late for Digital Research.

I was motivated to look at this ancient CP/M stuff again and my Commodorer 128D is quite a good system for that. Fun to play around with CP/M and really old software.

Thats how it looks, when my C128D is booted into CP/M 3.0 in 80 column mode.

This disk was shipped with every Commodore 128. It was a low density flip disk. On side A the basic system, on B the utilities.
There is an enhanced Version of this disk available called "ZP/M". Its Z80 instead of 8080 coded and runs faster. You can find it with other Commodore CP/M stuff here.

Its not difficult to find CP/M software on the web. Like MS Cobol, Turbo Pascal, Algol and other programming languages here. But not only programming languages, you can get there Wordstar, Dbase or other business related stuff as well.
If you are curious and don't own some CP/M hardware, don't worry. Emulator with ready made harddisk images are available.

Yes, its 2010, the year where I hopefully spent more time on the projects, I am writing about here in my blog. No real progress with Lincade development, but its on my todo, to finalise the changes to the image and release one with SATA and updated Kernel.

Recently I spend some time for my hobby, with modding my XBOX 360. Right now I am owning two XBOX 360. The first box (XENON model) I have bought here in Kuala Lumpur, came already with modified DVD drive. But the drive gave me some headache. Often the games stopped, due to reading errors. Later, the DVD tray refused to open after reading problems. After punching the 360, turning it off and on, I was able to remove the DVD. Sometimes it took me 15 minutes, to get the tray open. So I decided (the box was now already 2 years old), to open the box and update the firmwar and/or calibrate the laser. I found out, that the SATA plug was somewhat broken of the drive. The plastic brdige in the middle of the SATA plug, was lose. Maybe that causes the problem? Any tries with super glue failed. I calibrated the laser and it was better, but the problem returned. I was desperate and thought I should try a firmware upgrade. That Samsung ms-28 should be easy to update, but I struggled with even reading the flash. Probably because of the broken SATA plug. At one point, I must have bricked it. The drive was dead, the DVD key lost. It was not me who flashed it in the first place. So I had no copy of the original ROM. The dashboard Version was to new, the known King Kong exploit didn't work. I bought a RROD box with a working Hitachi. But with wrong DVD key, I was unable to play any game. That's why I decided in March 2009, to buy a new XBOX 360 (JASPER) with HDMI. But kept the old one, hoping one day I would be able to fix it.
Then, I think in December 2009, I read at hack-a-day, the 360 was hacked already 2 months ago. There was the "JTAG Hack" descrided, as a way to flash XELL into the flash of the box and make it boot e.g. Linux. When XELL starts, it displays the CPU Key on the screen. With the CPU key I would be able to extract the DVD key from a dump of my 360 flash memory. The Jtack Hack gives you full read/write access to the nand flash. Certain tools help, to get what I want.
So after sacrifying an old printer cable and soldering the wires into the old XENON, I was able to dump the nand and flash it with XELL. To get the DVD key was now a piece of cake. The next challenge was, to make the Hitachi work. I need to re-flash it with up-to-date firmware, change the DVD key and spoof a Samsung. Well, I never flashed a 360 drive before. A lot of things you need to know. Different drive versions and different procedures, depending on the state of the drive (flashed/unflashed). Here "Jungleflasher" was of big help. The tool itself is great, but even greater is the PDF document which works like an expert system, you can download there as well. In the PDF are links and it will guide you depending on many criterias through the right way, for your drive type/version, state and even helps you to solve Windows related issues if you can't access/flash the drive.
After flashing the drive, I had to get the 360 back into the state, where it starts with a dashboard, instead of XELL loader. At that time, XBREBOOT just became available. With XBREBOOT you can run unsigned code (homebrew) and its a patched dashboard. So I flashed it and what I've got is a 360, homebrew enabled with spoofed and working Hitachi drive. Its back to life! A sweet success after all that hassle and work on it!

Despite a lack of time, the development will be continued by me and John. We had an email conversation about a roadmap and the goals for the next version.
One bigger issue to deal with, is that the development of advmame was stopped already a while ago. We might switch to SDLmame and try to use advmenu together with that. Next option is to use Wahcade! instead of advmenu. Lets see.
Besides everything emulation related, the kernel and support of more hardware is a topic which will be covered. Quick results can't be expected, but at least we are again working on it!