Emulation Challenged
I've been working on an online CP/M emulator that runs in your browser using JavaScript.
And it works!
Except something that should not have been the difficult part.
Everything seems to mostly work apart from getting a visible flashing cursor that tracks your movements! This should NOT be so hard, especially as I am outputting monospaced text that interprets ansi escape sequences.
But I am, as usual, plumbing together other people's projects and that is tripping me up.
For some reason when the vt100 emulator outputs it adds spans and divs.
Not sure why it couldn't be one big PRE block of text. In fact, I might go back to that idea, or maybe a table that is a 80x25 grid.
I mean, that is how those terminals worked, just cells in 80 columns and 25 rows.
You can, however, switch between different terminals (vt100/ANSI/etc) and wrapping and clipping of text beyond the 80th column.
Partly it is my fault, in the original the text worked from top to bottom but I felt an original terminal would have the text entry at the bottom.
Currently you can mount your own disks in B, C, and D drives (A is the boot disk and is not swappable, though I would like to boot of a virtual hard disk some time in the future).
Microsoft BASIC and a copy of Star Trek are loaded in drive B: on startup.
That is very cool. I had a quick look, but it is so long since I used CP/M that I have forgotten how to work it. I used some machines my dad had for his business before DOS took over and I wrote up my degree project in Wordstar. People got quite creative with pure text games.
!BEER
I have some instructions here to refresh your memory :)
https://retrogamecoders.com/cp-m-the-linux-of-the-early-80s/
Funny finding you here
RE: Improving Hive’s semantic search performance
This reminds me that I have an old Kaypro portable CP/M machine I want to get up and running at some point. I've never really used CP/M before though I do also have a Commodore 128 that could be used for CP/M if I obtain the right disks...
I quite like CP/M, though I only experienced it a couple of times in my actual career. One was an amber-screened Apricot computer :)
You can tell how much inspiration MSDOS took from CP/M, it's a shame that CP/M lost that battle because there were a lot of things I think were better (not least the portability!)
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