Date   : Mon, 07 Sep 1987 11:34:11 GMT
From   : swrinde!petro!ssbn!bill@im4u.utexas.edu (Bill Kennedy)
Subject: Re: S100 68000 hardware

In article <8709060045.AA05306@ngp.utexas.edu> mknox@NGP.UTEXAS.EDU (Margaret
H. Knox) writes:
>>Ken asks about S100 68000 cards.
>
>The normal recommendation is the Compupro CP68K card.  It works with
>all the other Compupro boards, but it is also compatible with standard
>S100 stuff from anyone else.  The board does (or did) come with
>CP/M-68K.  If it doesn't, you can get CP/M-68K from TriSoft (generic
>version), or already customised from Gifford (if they still market
>it).  It should not be hard to port most any other system to the
>board.

Micro/Systems Journal is, indeed, a good place to look.  I bought a self
contained 68008 coprocessor from Peak Electronics in San Jose for around
$900 which included CP/M-68K, the BIOS and monitor sources (Aztec C),
512K RAM, two serial ports and a couple of timers.  The board has bus
rights on the S-100 bus so it can use existing peripherals.

Another interesting feature about the Peak board is how they implemented
CP/M-68K.  They presume that you are running CP/M-80 or CP/M-86 and they
provide a 68K boot program for each.  There's a small interface program
that lets the 68K use the existing BIOS for all of its physical I/O so
the setup is effortless.  When you are through with the 68K you just
execute the RETURN program and you are back where you came from.  This is
particularly useful if you have your favorite editors, etc. whereas
CP/M-68K only comes with ED.

You can get a Godbout board a lot cheaper but you'll have a lot more work
to get it going.  It's a full up 68000 so you don't have the 1Mb limit
of the 68008 but it's not a coprocessor so you will have to interface all
of your peripherals again.  The DRI assembler and C compiler are adequate
(their C is bulky and slow) but I shudder to think of using them to do
a BIOS from scratch.
-- 
Bill Kennedy  {cbosgd | ihnp4!petro | sun!texsun!rrm}!ssbn!bill