#: 82351 Sec. 1 - General Sb: #81955-#Commodore CP/M 08-Mar-84 11:27:33 Fm: Joel Rubin 70007,576 To: Sysop David Kozinn 76703,565 (X) In all fairness, it must be said that it is only $60 at discount stores, including the co-processor card and distribution disk. However, the disk format is not readily available, and software is not readily available in it. (although someone just converted modem7, and vdo--an Osborne editor in xa1, here, and Nevada Fortran, Cobol, and Turbo Pascal are available). It is true that extensive work has to be done to use a program like WordStar on it, and, considering the speed of the 1541 disk drive (painfully slow) you might not want to. Almost any editor or modem program will require 6502 code to run (because modem access is not through a Z-80 out instruction, but through 6502 NMI's, and because cursor addressing is done not through escape sequences but through 6502 ROM calls). One more problem is the amount of RAM available. It is difficult to use more than 48K of RAM, although you might be able to play with bankswitching on the 6510, and access 8K more of isolated space. (I think Data-20 does with their 80-column/Z-80 card which comes with SB-80; I don't know if they manage to map the 8K around so it appears not to be isolated). The 8K is an O/S ROM, used by the 6510 for I/O routines. (nearly all I/O bios routines switch the 6510 back in) (the other missing 8K is 4K of memory-mapped I/O and the first 4K of the 6510 memory space, including zero page, O/S vectors, and 1K for screen memory) Joel (CBM Sysop)