ZX81 RAM Disk Operating System

[RWAP]

Does anyone have more details of this: http://www.pictureviewerpro.com/hosting/zx81/zxros.htm

Seems interesting - wonder whatever happened to it?

[BrunoFlorindo]

Wow, I never saw that site until now. Maybe the author's msn e-mail address is still valid?

[siggi]

Maybe Wilf still has a copy of ROS????

http://www.pictureviewerpro.com/hosting ... rchive.htm

Siggi

[XavSnap]

Hi all!

I will able to retrive the Memory OS named " MOS 7 "

I had to convert it to a P file ... and will be available as soon as possible !

Xav Fun.

[XavSnap]

Hi Zx81 fans,

Many thanks to Didier Pous ...
(it's the French doc, sorry!)
http://zx81.ordi5.free.fr/k7/download/MOS7_DOC.pdf

Xav Fun.

[siggi]

Maybe Wilf still has a copy of ROS????

http://www.pictureviewerpro.com/hosting ... rchive.htm

Siggi

He had. And he gave it to me some time ago. Here it is ...

ROSJUL98.zip

(26.19 KiB) Downloaded 644 times

Siggi

[Andy Rea]

Wow Uber coolness

[stevenmcdonald]

Hi there!

Interesing thread lol!

Still no official release yet ! still some routines I need to get over from cassette as they are stored in a custom fast load format!



Will get around to it one day soon!

regards

Steven McDonald.

[mrtinb]

You can look at SIMDOS2 which is a RAM-disk for ZX81.

I use it when I need to join lines from different programs. Great software.

SimDos2
http://cd.textfiles.com/230/EMULATOR/SI ... /SIMDOS2.P

SimDos2 instructions
http://cd.textfiles.com/230/EMULATOR/SI ... OGINFO.TXT

[bwinkel67]

So for fun I created a very simple (5K) BASIC program that created a fully simulated MS-DOS like environment. The .p file can be found on the QL Forum as I used it to test my latest update to ZXSimulator. No machine code, just pure BASIC and the simulated environment comes with two programs you can execute (just more BASIC it runs):

https://qlforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=3193&start=170

I posted about it on one of the ZX81 Facebook pages and got pointed to the ZX81 Ram Disk Operating System by one commenter. I found the original author's page and googling some more it finally took me to this forum page and I found the zip file of the three version and got one of them to run with a beta version of XTender2 under DOSBox-X (none would work with the EightyOne emulator). It's pretty cool and you can actually use the space bar (i.e. it won't break) but I'm at a loss as to what you can do with it.

It's way more complex than my little BASIC-only simulation, but having read the documentation and played with it, what on earth are you supposed to be able to do with it other than run the bin and exe files that are already there. It lets you copy and delete and rename files and I guess lets you tape load files, but presumably it seems to eat up 8K of the 16K of memory for the RAM disk and then the OS itself takes up RAM, so you likely have little memory left to do anything. It also keeps describing this 8K static RAM with the 16K of RAM but I have no idea what that's about. Is this supposed to work with some other piece of hardware? Note that I haven't tried to load it on an actual TS1000 but will do that when I get home.

Just curious if anyone on here actually knows what the RAM Disk OS is supposed to do. My little MS-DOS simulation took me less than an hour to write and a bit more to refine, but its point is to just give you a feel of what MS-DOS would be like and its environment is closed and limited to like 4 commands. It seems this Ram Disk OS is trying to be a real OS but what type of "executables" can you run and does the OS disappear when that happens and with so little resources left, it seems that it needs some hardware extension. Anyone here know?