Hive Works part 2 aka VibeDroneBeeWolfQueen

[Graham72]

I got sick of UK information on Telstar so adapted the adaptor for text only internet through FROGFIND.COM If FROGFIND is down then it falls thru to duckduckgo. I also have a mini spreadsheet in HIVE now. Its not world class software but proves how good the  'bee still is.

   

[Graham72]

So for ease of use I have hived off the PC85 ROM VERSION from VibeDrone and now have VibeDroneQueen to run either the CF CP/M 2.2 img or FUZIX.

I am happy with FUZIX now: it builds upon the .5 coldberg release, main things being the text only internet access to Telstar / Frog Find and bank switching by using Ctrl 1 thru to Crtrl 4. So hive has 6 different programs using TAB / CTRL O P V etc to switch between them and then there are 3 other processes that can run. Switching is simultaneous: games and telstar come back as they were.

Banks    Size               Used for
0 and 2 64K The kernel. The Z80 sees 64K at a time, and only the low 32K can be switched. So the kernel is bank 0 in the low half plus its fixed upper bank, which the code calls bank 2. Both are kept off the list of free banks.

15       32K Disk buffers. The top bank holds 63 buffers of 512 bytes, about 31.5K of cached disk blocks. Before the BUF01 change these lived in the kernel's own memory.

11–14 128K HIVE stores data in these 4 banks, and the kernel copies it in and out through ioctls. No program ever runs in them.

10        32K Console screens. The 8K saved screens for tty1 to tty4.

1, 3–9  256K Programs. These 8 banks are what the kernel hands out to running programs. Each program gets a 32K bank, so up to 16 processes can be held, swapping the rest to hda2 -- usually init which is not doing much anyway.

The only sucky thing is that programs and their data have to share that 32K, the other 32K each time is KERNEL. I find it depressing after having 57-59TPA in CP/M.

BUT having a custom TUI workspace with multitasking, bank-switching, and integrated apps on 8-bit Z80 architecture is pretty neat!