Assorted pictures of my P112 and P112s belonging to other people.
The P112 is a stand-alone 8-bit CPU board. Typically running CP/M (tm) or a similar operating system, it provides a Z80182 (Z-80 upgrade) CPU with up to 1MB of memory, serial, parallel and diskette IO, and realtime clock, in a 3.5-inch drive form factor. Powered solely from 5V, it draws 150mA (nominal: not including disk drives) with a 16MHz CPU clock. Clock speeds up to 24.576MHz are possible.
The P112 board was last available new in 1996 by Dave Brooks. His page is here. In late 2004 on the Usenet Newsgroup comp.os.cpm, talk about making another run of P112 boards was discussed. I decided to step forward. With Dave Brooks blessing and the assistance of others, new boards were fabricated. That run has sold out. Since then there have been many requests that I make more
Financing through Kickstarter was a success. I am now waiting on the PCBs to be made and parts to be delivered. If you didn't get in on the Kickstarter project, don't worry. I am now taking preorders. The price is $200 for a complete kit shipped anywhere in the US. For one shipped outside the US, the price is $215. You can place your order using the handy Paypal button below. Delivery is expected to begin in late January.
This P112 board project is very different from the one Dave Brooks offered. The board itself is the same, but that's about all that stayed the same. The "native" operating system is now ZSDOS, an enhanced replacement for CP/M 2.2. The old DOS+ boot disk can still be used, but is discouraged. UZI-180, a Unix clone for the Z180 processor is available in a version specifically customized for the P112.
In this kit you will get the board with surface-mount parts soldered on, a boot ROM, and serial port pigtails. See this parts list for a list of parts, part numbers, and a Mouser Project for ordering the remaining needed parts. To this you'll need to add a chassis, power supply, terminal, and floppy drives.
The documentation has been pulled together into a single PDF file, updated, edited, and cleaned up. A copy of the Walnut Creek CP/M CD dated Nov 1994 is included. No permission was needed to replicate it. Another CD is provided which contains the documentation PDF and lots of other stuff that was deemed interesting (like CP/M 2.2 and UZI-180).
Another nifty thing about the P112 is that you can get an IDE interface for it. Terry Gulczynski has adapted Tilmann Reh's GIDE design to an expansion board for the P112. With this, you can connect a hard drive, CD drive, or flash drive to a P112.
The GIDE is capable of doing full 16-bit data transfers at all times. It does not rely on the drive being able to handle 8-bit data transfers. Earlier I had this wrong.
No problem! One of my cohorts, Terry Gulczynski, will build and test your P112 for you. He also has IDE interfaces. If that's what you want, please tell me when you email me. He doesn't have any P112 kits. The idea is that you pay me for a kit and I'll send it to Terry for assembly. He'll then send it to you.
Check out his website at http://home.roadrunner.com/~tgcons/ for more information.
The following disk images are retained for hysterical raisins.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at dave@661.org.
This page was last updated on September 12, 2012