Hi!

I couldn't help following the long fascinating thread on Sprinter OS design on the russian part of the forum, and since i don't speak russian very well(not at all, that is) i thought i'd post my opinions and questions on the subject. =)

A few people seem to have suggested the idea that CP/M compatibility should be introduced in the Sprinter OS, or even integrated in a new OS. Now, even though compatibility with the existing library of software for CP/M is a compelling thought, my opinion is that doing so will possibly restrict the platform to a historical dead end. I'd much rather picture a more modern operating system with a more sophisticated API and perhaps even multitasking. That leads me to my second question of the day .=)

On Macintosh, as well as on Amiga, a great problem has been the lack of memory protection, which greatly has affected the stability (and reputation) of these platforms. As i understand it, in both of these cases, the reason behind the operating systems' failure to accomodate for memory protection has been due to early versions of the hardware not supporting it. This is the reason for me asking the following question:

Since the PLD seems to be connected between the memory and the CPU, would it be possible to modify the PLD architecture in such a way that some manner of memory protection would be possible to prevent applications from over-writing each other?

Best regards

I think that CP/M is a good chance for Sprinter and the gap between normal pcs and Sprinter will be (in my opinion) reduced.
What about to use Z80000 (32 bit Zilog processor Z80 compatible)? in this case a "pc emulated mode" is possible.... so the newer kind of speccy could be an antagonist of normal pc!! the pc emulated mode is possible translating machine code into the Zilog architecture... Z80000 machine code is compatible with z80. Only the addressing is more capable...

Good point. The question i think it's important to ask however, is whether pc-compatibility is a good thing or not. Even though the early PCs did have a CP/M like operating system, it was not really CP/M, per se. It's also important to realize that CP/M and MS-DOS was made with considerably more limited computers in mind, than the Sprinter. It would be more suitable to look to the more capable computers of that age, that featured rich sound and graphics, like the Amiga. Also i think the Sprinter would make a very poor PC indeed. In my opinion, the best way for the Sprinter to realize its potential is to go its own way, because it is a very unique computer - in fact, the only computer of its kind available to consumers!

Emulation of CP/M should be possible without too much trouble, considering the hardware resources of the Sprinter. While most CP/M computers of the eighties ran on 3.85MHz processors with 64Kb ram or less, the Sprinter runs at a whopping 23MHz and carries 4 megabytes of ram. That should probably be enough to emulate much more complex things than CP/M.

As for the z80000, i don't know much about it. If memory doesn't fail me, i recall that it was cancelled from production, after turning out to be a huge commercial failure.