Olivetti M-20 PCOS or other OS

[SP]

Thanks, Dwight. I saw the problem with the floppy just know with one Pentium
I have... I am rescuing my XT-286 from the basement to my home to manage the
diskettes.

Regards
Sergio

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dwight K. Elvey" <dwight.elvey at amd.com>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 8:31 PM
Subject: Re: Olivetti M-20 PCOS or other OS


>
> >From: "SP" <spedraja at ono.com>
> >
> >Hello. I own one Olivetti M-20 that I'm cleaning and checking. All
appears
> >to go well but the diskette with the PCOS system is damaged. Someone
dispose
> >of one operative copy of PCOS or another OS for this machine ? I would be
> >agreed for the eternity (uh... perhaps less time, but a lot sure).
> >
> >Thanks
> >Sergio
>
> Hi Sergio
>  What type of disk drives does it have? We have the ability
> to create disk for the 320K drive but haven't had enough
> experience to do this for the 640K disk.
>  If you have an AT level PC with a 360K drive, you may
> be able to create the boot disk your self. The PC does
> need to have a controller that writes FM format. Many
> of the newer PC didn't support FM since most PC's
> were only using MFM 360K or newer.
>  The first track on the 340K disk is done in FM ( single
> density ) while all the rest are done in MFM ( double
> density ).
>  Most M20's were shipped with memory cards that had
> 16K DRAMs. The motherboards usually had 128K of 64K
> chips. With the three memory cards, at 32K each, the
> normal configuration would be 224K. To run the CPM8000,
> you'd need to have a minimum of 256K. This would require
> having a memory card with 64K chips. I've modified
> my memory cards to use the 64K chips. To bring up
> CP/M-8000. Still, to make CP/M-8000 disks still requires
> writing the first track with FM data.
>  PCOS runs fine on the 224K unless you want to run
> some of the developement tools like PASCAL that
> requires 384K as a minimum. Their BASIC runs fine in
> the 224K machines.
>  Look at:
>
> ftp://ftp.groessler.org/pub/chris/olivetti_m20/
>
>  There you'll find some images for PCOS and tools to create
> disks. You can try the tool wrm20.com, that I wrote.
> If the controller you have is compatable with FM, you
> should be able to create the boot disk. I'm also
> told that the images are compatable with tools like
> 22disk but I've not confirmed this.
>  Look at:
>
>  http://www.cpm.z80.de/binary.html
>
>  For the CP/M-8000 stuff.
>
>  Worst case, I can send a floppy to you in the snail-mail.
>  Anyway, let me know what kind of machine you have,
> like B&W or color, disk drives and RAM?
> Later
> Dwight
>
>
>