We're sorry but this page doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Feedback

Running DOS & Unix on an 8-bit Commodore

Formal Metadata

Title
Running DOS & Unix on an 8-bit Commodore
Title of Series
Number of Parts
798
Author
Contributors
License
CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Identifiers
Publisher
Release Date
Language

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
In 1983, Commodore introduced CBM-II, the successor to their aging line of PET business computers. It featured a 6502 CPU running at 2 MHz and up to 256 kB memory. But its most interesting feature was a second CPU interface, which (much like Acorn's Tube) allowed to attach various CPUs to the system. Commodore designed two cards: Z80 (for running CP/M) and 8088 (for running MS-DOS). Back in these days, though, MS-DOS had a separate version for each platform. Therefore you could only run specially crafted Commodore MS-DOS 1.25 on the computer, because it was obviously not PC-compatible. A few years ago I set out to fix this deficiency. I asked myself: is it possible to make the platform (more) PC compatible? As it turns out, it is, and practically without any modifications to the original design. You just need to write a piece of software that emulates the PC BIOS and some parts of the PC hardware platform. For this, one wire needs to be added to the hardware, which generates a NMI when an I/O chip is accessed; the emulation software then simulates the non-existing I/O peripheral. Based on this work, I was able to make the platform compatible enough to run modern FreeDOS, as well as other PC software: Norton Commander, Turbo Pascal, QBASIC and more. As a follow-up, I designed a Z8000 processor card using the second CPU interface; this card is meant to emulate the abandoned Commodore 900 Unix workstation. This is a work in progress right now; so far the card is able to boot the Commodore 900 BIOS and complete the I/O chip self test (the I/O chips are obviously also emulated in software).