More CP/M storage space needed

General discussions related to the Altair 8800 Clone

More CP/M storage space needed

Postby Deoxys357 » April 4th, 2023, 11:07 am

I've recently run into a problem trying to get this C compiler onto the Altair 8800. The reason is that the cpm.dsk disk image that I need to pull files from has over 700K worth of files. The CP/M disk that came with the Altair Clone has just over 200K. I tried removing all files from the C compiler disk that I thought were unnecessary, but that still left over 400K worth of files on the disk. I was wondering if anyone knows if and how the storage space on the Altair CP/M disks can be increased.
Deoxys357
 
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Re: More CP/M storage space needed

Postby Wayne Parham » April 6th, 2023, 1:42 pm

There are 330Kb image files for both the BDS and Aztec C compilers.

I would suggest installing one of those as your B: drive and make the C: drive empty. The A: drive should have a bootable copy of CP/M, of course.

Once you do that, you can use the C: drive for all your source files. Small programs can be copied onto B: and compiled there. But if you have a particularly large program and need extra room, you can build on the C: drive. That way the compiler, assembler and linker can use the extra space.

You can write submit files to do all the compile, assemble and link operations. Or you can type them in manually, one command at a time. I would suggest doing it manually at first, and then making a submit file to build from.

There are some examples in the link below.

There are a few C programs in that archive, each with its own simple submit file. Most of those programs have a single source file but some have multiple source files, and one uses overlays. Some use Aztec C and others use BDS. Some have versions for both, So you'll find examples of each.

See the example "make.sub" build file below:

cc $1.c
as -ZAP $1.asm
ln $1.o c.lib

That's one I use for many of the simple single-source programs. To build with it, you type something like this:

submit make clife

That command would build a program called "clife.c" and create clife.com.

If you wanted, you could put the C compiler on drive B: and the source files on C:

Then type something like this:

A>c:
C>b:cc c:clife.c
C>b:as c:clife.asm
C>b:ln c:clife.o c:c.lib

That will use the Aztec C compiler programs on B: to build clife.com on the C: drive using source code from the C: drive.
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