A quick history of the CPeMulator: The original 8080 emulator was written on a bet in 1981 that specified that Microsoft CP/M Basic had to be able to run under the emulator. The bet further specified that the program had to be written in one week. The computer used for development was a Lomas 8086 cpu in a S100 box. The emulator almost worked, it would blow up after running the program or listing it. The 8080 emulator was then shelved. In 1983 I was faced with the problem of converting a 8080 communications program to the IBM PC. After three months of effort I came to the realization that the tools needed to perform the conversion were simply not available for the IBM yet. I was faced with either a six month re-write of the program from scratch, or to find another way. The 8080 emulator was the other way. The original 8080 emulator was not usable as it was, but using the idea behind the emulator I was able to write an emulator specifically to run the CP/M program on the IBM PC. The result was that in one month I was able to release the program. The communications program was called COPYLINK and was marketed through U.S. Digital. It came with two files, COPYLINK.COM which was the emulator, and COPYLINK.OVL which was the 8080 program. (If you were to rename a CP/M MBASIC program to COPYLINK.OVL and replace the original COPYLINK.OVL file with it you would be able to run the CP/M MBASIC program.) Thus two years later the original bet was finally resolved. In the course of my conversations with people about the COPYLINK program I found there was an interest in being able to run CP/M programs on the IBM PC but without having to purchase hardware to do so. (The Blue Board was the popular means to do so at the time.) As a result of this I took the time to write a general usage emulator for the IBM PC which was called the CPeMulator. The CPeMulator was also marketed through U.S. Digital. Later a Z80 version of the emulator was written to cover those programs that were Z80 dependent, though it was found that typical Z80 CP/M programs seemed to be machine dependent and thus often would not run on the IBM PC because the expected hardware simply wasn't there. The 8080 CPeMulator was used as the basis for the V2080 emulator. In 1985 I received a call from a friend about a nifty new part from NEC that could be plugged in place of the 8088 processor and could emulate 8080 code. I quickly rush out and obtained one of the parts, and two weeks later the V2080 emulator came into existence. Having been in contact with other dealers and programmers as a result of the 8080 CPeMulator. I knew that I was not the only one preparing a V20 based 8080 emulator for the market. Recognizing that the emulator was really a small market (there were only about six active companies in the field), it was decided that the program could be better put to use as advertising. Thus it was released as a shareware product. By the start of 1986 the computer industry shakeup began to affect U.S. Digital. Since I needed to eat, I terminated my relationship with U.S. Digital and moved on to there work (helping program a multi-tasking OS on the 68000 called K-OS for Hawthorne Technology). Later in the year, monetary pressures again forced me to move on to a higher paying position and thus I went to work for Frye Electronics writing data capture and analysis programs for hearing-aid test equip- ment, but not before I took an unexpected two month vacation with two broken heals as a result of a climbing accident. During this timem U.S. Digital finally succumbed to its continued loss of revenue due to the changing fortunes in the computer software industry. In July 1986 the bank foreclosed on its loans, effectively terminating further business operations by U.S. Digital. In the ensuing process of the termination of U.S. Digital's business operations, the control and rights to the CPeMulator and COPYLINK programs were returned to me as the author (it took over a year to resolve the legal issues in this). Since that time I have re-written the CPeMulator to take care of some of the complaints that have come up. Several of these included problems running the program on the Compaq computer (interrupt vector conflicts), problems with running the program under debugers (stack problems) and the limitations of the built-in ADM3A terminal emulation (solved by removing the terminal emulation entirely). I am releasing the new CPeMulator again as a shareware package with a few new twists just to make it interesting. A new approach to commercial use of the program being one of them which is more fully described in the Z80CPEM.DOC file. I hope that you find the new CPeMulator program a useful addition to your program library and that it provides you with the solution to your CP/M to MS-DOS problems. Sincerely, Michael Day - end -