Main Content

CP/M 8266

Z80-CP/M 2.2 emulator running on ESP8266. This is my attempt to run CP/M 2.2 for Z80 softwares on an ESP8266. The CP/M machine have 64K RAM, 15 floppy drives @ 250KB each and an autobauding serial port as a console device. Since the ESP8266 only have 96KB of Data RAM and even when runnig the “NONOS-firmware from Espressif the free heap, after the WIFI & TCP/IP stacks are loaded, is less than 48KB which was my minimum goal for CP/M RAM. Luckily the nosdk8266 project from cnlohr solves the RAM issue. By using the it I get more than 80KB of heap which is more than enough for the 64KB RAM in the Emulator. But this unfortunately comes with a cost - namlely no wifi. Not really a showstopper for me, but it would have been nice to be able to just Telnet into the CP/M machine to connect to the emulated terminal. But not all hope is lost for those who want wifi and telnet - I’m currently patching in an option to compile a version with about 36K RAM, wifi and one less floppy disk.”

Link to article