Prepare to program the Altair by using CP/M
In this unit, you'll learn background information about programming the Altair emulator from CP/M.
When you start the Altair emulator, it runs CP/M by default. From CP/M, you can program the Altair emulator by using Microsoft BASIC, BD Software C, and Microsoft MACRO-80 Assembler.
Note
You can change the boot order so that the Altair emulator starts by running Altair BASIC. You set the boot order from the Boot Config section in the cmake/altair_config.cmake file.
Saving files to disk
Files can be saved to disk when the Altair emulator is running CP/M. To save files to disk, you must run the virtual disk server or have an Avnet Azure Sphere Starter Kit with the MikroE microSD Click.
Introduction to CP/M
For more information about CP/M, see the CP/M Wikipedia article.
CP/M originally stood for Control Program/Monitor. Later, CP/M became known as Control Program for Microcomputers. It was a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc.
The first version was single-tasking on 8-bit processors with support for up to 64 kilobytes of memory. Later versions of CP/M added multiple-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors.
Programming options on CP/M
From CP/M, you can start MBASIC (Microsoft BASIC), and write and save apps to virtual drive B. For C and assembler applications, you can edit with the WordStar text editor and save files to virtual drive B.