Æsthetics turned up to 11.

Japanese CP/M handbook visuals were peak future.

My brain feels Gundam, Bladerunner, Tetsuo and Retrocomputing in one go.

Some highlights for your timeline...

#Japanese #RetroTech
#CPM #RetroComputing
#Typography

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Has anyone given thought to a modern keyboard, and modern character set needs, with CP/M? I think the situation might be close to hopeless; the documentation states explicitly "strip off the 8th bit" eg. 0x7f, so 1968 ASCII it is, but having app subvert the BIOS is common.

Just thought I'd ask before I set the task aside. I'm using a USB keyboard and mapping scan codes straight up; I've done real keyboards with dead keys etc but not for a long time. And honestly don't relish coding it (though I could maybe do it not in the Z80).

But even 512 bytes for a keymap is pushing it. That's 1/128th of total RAM space.

Digiday: TikTok ad prices fall as uncertainty keeps some advertisers away. “Advertisers are split on whether to double down or cash out as TikTok’s future in the U.S. hangs in the balance. But enough have walked away to send ad prices downward for those who do stay. CPMs on the app declined 80% between January 2024 and January 2025, according to an estimate from adtech firm AdRoll based on […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/03/22/digiday-tiktok-ad-prices-fall-as-uncertainty-keeps-some-advertisers-away/

The #DEC #Rainbow never officially supported #Windows, since it came too late to the market to be the bridge between CP/M and #DOS that it wanted to be, with PCs already dominating the market. But some dedicated DEC engineers wanted to see Windows run on the Rainbow. And they did. And you can, too.

#cpm #digital #microsoft #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #z80 #8088

https://renaissancedork.com/rainbow-through-windows/

CP/M-86 for Newbies is a starter kit for CP/M-86 with everything ready to unpack and run. It bundles the PCe PC emulator (Windows only), preconfigured PCe environments for running different CP/M-86 versions including Concurrent CP/M-86 and Concurrent DOS, and other software such as the Pirx Commander file manager.

https://github.com/MarekStarobrat/Pirx.Commander/tree/main/Releases/CPM-86

Wow, I didn't realise that LibreOffice turns 40 this year with it's latest release.

It started out as closed source Star Writer for CP/M in 1985 with DOS 3.2support in 1986.

Then became Star Office in 1994 for Windows 3.1

It became open source as Open office in 2001 and the LibreOffice fork in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

After much testing and code comparison, the new Feb 2025 Release of #Vezza - my #z80 high speed #zmachine is ready! Took way longer than expected to synchronize across all of the code bases, particularly making sure that all optimizations made it across all platforms - TRS-80 model 1, TRS-80 model 3, TRS-80 model 4, the CP/M versions (~18 platforms), the embedded versions (Spectrum tape, TEC-1G), and slowly pushing into the Agon Light version (which has even more updates still in progress). Lots of individual tweaks, and some major rethinks and rewrites have come together to accelerate game play.

The hardest part of rewriting in this update involved rewriting the dictionary search code. I ended up going back to the original jzip interpreter, written in C for Unix waaay back when. Jzip provided much of the logic that went into ZXZVM, which provided the base for #M4ZVM #M3ZVM and #Vezza. Going back to Jzip made sense as Jzip has an even longer history; and is highly tested and stable and still maintained. This research gave me the confidence that the streamlining and changes I was making to such a fundamental part of the game would work, making all inputted dictionary searching more efficient.

To work around how CP/M stores executable files I spent a lot of time re-organising the memory map to make the executable smaller. This involved rearranging where the initialization code was stored inside the increasingly complex layout. Support across multiple versions means I needed to break up variable sized code and strings to sit inside variable sized gaps, while still compiling all the CP/M versions from the same interconnected set of source files. It needed quite a few manual checks to ensure that it all worked.

What this all means is that your favourite #infocom #punyinform and other text adventures will all play on your favourite z80 #retrocomputing platforms even faster than before!

More details in the devlog and downloads can be found at:
#TRS80 versions https://sijnstra.itch.io/m4zvm
#CPM #CPM80 versions https://sijnstra.itch.io/vezza