Newest Stack-180 CP/M system with motherboard option and networking
- From: "Keith (mountaintop)" <kharrell@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:23:37 -0700 (PDT)
I have been using Terry Gulczynski latest Stack-180 with his
newest motherboard for the few weeks now and have to say in my mind
that it is the fastest and most advanced CP/M(ZSDOS) system I have
seen. I decided to provide this information because a lot of people I
have spoken to have never heard of the stack-180 system. Terry has had
a number of issues with ISP's for his web site and has gotten behind
in the information for this system. Terry like a number of people is a
hardware and software designer first and web master last. He has
information and prices listed now on his site along with some photos
of the boards. If you like to playing with CP/M then you will love
ZCPR3. I still like to compile code using a number of compilers to
writing z80 code. I also
have a number of S-100 system which work well but often limit me in
storage options, memory, speed and just plain reliability sometimes.
The Stack-180 system consists of three boards. Terry offers the
system in kit form or built and tested. The CPU board has a z8s180-33
CPU and includes 1 meg of ram and one serial port for terminal I/O The
GIDE board has two IDE ports called Primary and Secondary which allow
a master and slave to be attached
to each for a total of 4 ide drives. These can be IDE hard drives or
CF drives using an IDE to CF adapter. These two boards have been out
for some time now and I have used them for years. The next board is
the base of a lot of features. It is a ATX type motherboard that these
two boards plug into. The MB has two ISA slots called slot 3 and slot
4. The motherboard also has two serial ports, Real time clock and a
number of optional devices which I will explain later. These two slots
can support multifunctional boards to expand the system with
additional IDE ports, serial ports, parallel port and floppy drives.
The system I have has two IDE HD's attached to the GIDE as master HD's
and two CF cards attached to the GIDE as slave that are for backup to
the IDE HD's. This allow me to boot either the stack-os which is ZSDOS
3 or the B/P system which does have some limits for support of all the
devices available. I have found the ZSDOS 3 system to be the best of
the two operating system but both are supplied. In slot 3 i have a
multifunction card that has another two serial ports a parallel port
and another IDE interface. I use this card to attach a CDROM drive,
zip drive and two 3 1/2 floppy drives. The card in slot 4 contains
another multifunctional card that has another floppy and IDE
interface. I have a CF card attached to the IDE port and have the
floppy interface turned off. There are three optional components can
be added to the motherboard and this is where the real magic of this
system come to light. You can add a network interface called the xport
which allows you to connect to the system from anywhere in the world
assuming you have a static IP address you can use. The 10/100 Ethernet
interface supports a host of options that if you have used a cisco
router interface you will feel right at home. The xport has a HTTP
server, Telnet server and SSH server to mentioned a few. The system
ONLY supports a telnet session at 230,400 baud this time and more than
likely will may be its limit for awhile but Terry can better answer
that. This limit is only based on time required to write the software.
Web site that talks more about the xport features.
http://www.lantronix.com/device-networking/embedded-device-servers/xport.html
You could also write your own code to access all these features
if you like. You can configure this interface via a telnet session or
the built-in HTTP server built-in to the unit. I have a static address
assigned to mine which allows me to telnet into the system using my
laptop at 230,400 baud. In addition to just telnet and using the
system the same as a terminal attached to the cpu serial port you can
also power up and down the system via this telnet session. When I'm
suppose to be with my wife watching tv or movie I use my laptop to
telnet in the the system which powers it up and then when I finished I
run the off.com program to turns it off when I exit the telnet
session. When I want to turn the system I just telnet into the ip
address and system starts up. I can also reboot the system via this
session using the boot.com program. I can then change the system bios
options and enable or disable devices before I select which device and
operating system I want to boot. Selecting G for first or primary IDE
Hard drive(stack-os) and GS for Secondary
interface which has the B/P system.
The next optional interface is a device called the USBwiz. This
is a USB/SD capable interface that allows you to build your HD's. It
does support Fat32 so updates can be download and then copied to the
thumbdrive on you pc and then you can build a new system with updates
or new features when they are available. You can't access the FAT32
thumbdrive directly from CP/M and must use the built in bios option to
load a new hd or CF device. Terry does provides a program to backup
your HD/CF devices to the thumb drive as an image or file by file. The
restore for file by file is still underway. Again all these feature
are available to you to write yourself.
The last option for the motherboard is a hex display which can be
programmed via a I/O port in CP/M. This hex display is also handy in
troubleshoot your system during build as it provides a number of check
points during the boot process.
The system comes to you as a new motherboard would come if you were
building a new PC. You add the ATX power supply, hard drives, cdrom,
floppies, cables and case. The power supply MUST be ver 2.0 for the
system to operate correctly and this also always you to get the remote
power up and down which is part of the ver 2.0 power supply
requirements. Most of the power supplies that have the additional 4 or
6 power connector that plugs into the motherboard will work. In
closing I will have to say that this system is very open source. All
the software source and hardware schematics are provided on a cdrom
along with complete manuals of chips used and devices(xport, usbwiz)
provided.
If you have questions look at his website or download the manual which
is a work in progress which is updated often so check back from time
to time and see if you like what you see. I have had my new
motherboard system for only a few weeks but all the features I spoke
of I have used so it's not vaporware.
Things I have thought about doing are
Internet access. The tcp stack is already in the xport so a lot is
already done.
FTP server. Again most is already done in the xport device.
HTTP server. Using the Xport again
Access to the thumb drive from CP/M to access the FAT32 data. This
will allow easy transfer of file to and from CP/M
Video card interface. With telnet running at 230k I'm not sure how
important this would be.
Sound card interface.
Game port interface. It's on my multifunction card now but is
disabled.
http://home.roadrunner.com/~tgcons/index.html
.
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