A "portable CP/M" codename is mentioned in the sources which brought a little bit of enthusiasm to those not very much into the CP/M technicalities.
An article mentions a Pascal conversion, which IMO just brings further confusion.
I understood that at a certain point in the earlier eighties Digital Research got hold of a C compiler for the Motorola 68000 named "Alcyon C Compiler", which was used to port those commands originally written in PL/M to the Motorola CPU.
Both the sample BIOS in C in the CP/M-68K manual and the comments in the sources for the Z8000 refer to the "Alcyon C", thus I tend to agree with this comment:
Code: Select all
The developer of these versions was an experienced UNIX programmer. The
compilers were bought from outside companies for these projects. Since
no PL/M compiers existed, it was faster to translate the utilites. The
Z8000 CP/M is based on the 68K version, and was done because Zilog was
begging them to port CP/M to the Z8000. I don't know if Olivetti was
already lined up as a customer when the project was started.
They don't need the usual C libraries, they do everything by directly interfacing to BDOS and directly parsing the command line buffer.
Well, it looks like z88dk could be able to support a backport !
Here's an example of a partially working STAT command written for the Olivetti M20 but built and run on a ZX Spectrum +3 with CP/M v3.
I'm putting the backport here. Beware! It is not working stuff !!
https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk-ext/tree ... ted/CPM/DR