International (European) Keyboard for IZ2S/IZ2Se/EZ2S
A French ZipitZ2 owner, Dom has kindly put together a keymap and font collection for IZ2S/IZ2Se/EZ2S that allows you to enter and display accented characters on the ZIpitZ2.
You can find the download here.
Forth for the Tandy M100/M102
Michael Alyn Miller has written an ANS Forth option rom for the Tandy Model 100 which looks rather nice especially if you can program in Forth. I don't have a REX add-on for my m100's but it looks as if it'll work best if you have a REX although if you can blow eproms then you could make your own option rom. If you don't have a real m100 then you could run it in VirtualT.
New tutorial for upgrading the kernel and running debian on a ZipitZ2
designate72 from the #zipit irc channel has written a new tutorial on how to upgrade the kernel on a ZipitZ2. It is more up to date than the other tutorials for this on the web so I recommend that it is the one to follow at the moment. There is an easier way using wicknix's (from the #zipit irc channel) z2sid but the tutorial is good anyway.
Emulation (and Gaming) on the cheap
Over at hunterdavis.com Hunter has written a great post on using the dockstar as a gaming and emulation system. The dockstar is something I keep mulling on getting a few as they can be had for as little as $25 but i've not had the spare cash recently because what little disposable income i've had recently has been used to get psion organiser 2 and tandy model 10X stuff. I'm now definatly going to be saving my pennies for some dockstars (unless someone wants to send me a brace or two) though as i have a lot of emulators i use on a regular basis and i play wesnoth fairly regularly too. Even if you aren't that interested in Gaming and Emulation it's still a good article on the dockstar. the relevant post is here
serial terminal for IZ2S/EZ2S
I've eaten thanksgiving dinner (and cooked it too and done the washing up) and the wife is being a TV hog so rather than watch the rubbish she wants to watch I put on my headphones, fired up a belle and sebastian cd and looked for something useful to port to a stock zipit z2 running IZ2S or EZ2s. I finally decided that a serial terminal program would be useful. So here in all it's glory is a IZ2S/EZ2S compatable binary of ssterm.
The binary is here and you can just drop it into the bin directory on the sd card.
Another console/tty clock program for the Zipit Z2
I stumbled across a program called tbclock this morning and decided to see if it would run on the ZipitZ2, there is no reason why it shouldn't as it is ncurses based but i've come across quite a few ncurses based programs that aren't too keen on the default character resolution of the ZipitZ2's LCD (changing to a smaller font normally fixes the problems but my eyes aren't as good as they used to be so alot of fonts aren't exactly usable for me, others might be able to cope with smaller fonts than the default 8x8 font). There were no problems with building it using the instructions on the webpage and it runs really well on the Zipit console and via an ssh session. tbclock is not only a binary clock, it is also a game and a "stopwatch". You can download the IZ2s/IZ2se,EZ2S compatable binary here and it's manpage is here. just drop the binary into the bin directory on your sd card and all should be good.
Two console/tty clock apps for the ZipitZ2
I recently needed a clock application for my zipit. I found two ncurses based ones that do what I want. tty-clock and clockywock (work via ssh and on the ZipitZ2 LCD, fit the ZipitZ2 LCD, look prettyish, work). Personally i find that i prefer tty-clock (which is surprising as i am definatly an analog kinda of guy when it comes to time pieces. There is just something about a second hand whizzing around and the guestimation required to guage the time that appeals to me at some instinctual level). I've built both and they are compatable with all versions and variants of Z2Shell, IZ2S and EZ2S so you shoudl be able to just drop them onto any sd card running those shells.
The download for tty-clock is here and clockywock is here
4tH for the ZipitZ2
[ Thirtieth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 21/07/10]
I've built 4tH for the zipit. I haven't modded the editor for the Zipits screensize yet as I just wanted to check that it built and ran correctly before making any changes. It seems to be running well so far and all the examples work (or at least the ones i've tried, which is about 90% of them).
4tH is a Forth Compiler and Interpreter that is almost fully ANSI Forth compatable and has been ported to MS-DOS/FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, OS X, AIX, BSD, BeOS, RISC-OS... and any programs you write will run on any of the ports with no recompiling.
My build runs on a Zipit running Z2Shell, IZ2s, IZ2Se and EZ2S, in other words any zipit that hasn't had it's kernel/initramfs or bootloader upgraded and can be downloaded here
Mounting a raw disk image
[ Twentynineth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 09/08/10]
I have recently started moving my ZipitZ2 development from a combination of aboriginal linux, buildroot and scratchbox1 to a combination of aboriginal linux, buildroot and scratchbox2 which means I need a way to seed the development rootfs with a working rootfs. Now I could manually move files from a ZipitZ2 to the scratchbox2 rootfs but that is error prone as I might miss a file or two or I might mess up permissions and setting up device nodes etc. is a right PITA. The easiest thing to do is to use someone else's rootfs however they are normally distributed as a disk image with one or more partitions in the image which makes mounting them normally almost impossible a bit problematic especially with large disk images (this is not completely true any more if you are using a modern distro with the latest versions things like util-linux). However there is a nice linux program available (available in every linux distribution there is as it's an important command) called losetup that will let us use a disk image as if it is a disk.
We'll use mozzwald's ubuntu rootfs image as an example of how to mount a partition within a disk image. After downloading and untar'ing his rootfs image you need to mount the image as a disk using losetup
sudo losetup /dev/loop0 zubuntu-jaunty-basic-rc1_05172010.img
Once you have done that you can then treat the device /dev/loop0 as if it was a real disk, all the utilities and programs that manipulate disks in linux will work as expected. So what we now need to do is workout where the first partition (or any other partition we are insterested in) is located within the disk image. To do that we use fdisk.
sudo fdisk -lu /dev/loop0
we use the u option as we want to get the fdisk to talk in sectors and not cylinders.
To calculate the offset multiply the units (512) by the partition's start (243), which in this case gives us 124416. Detach the disk image from the loop device.
sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0
and then reattach the disk image to the loop device using the calculated offset.
sudo losetup -o 124416 /dev/loop0 zubuntu-jaunty-basic-rc1_05172010.img
and then mount the loop device as normal.
sudo mount /dev/loop0 /media/rootfs
and you are done and can copy the files from the disk image to wherever you want.
[update: there are other less convoluted ways to mount raw disk images if you have a recent version of util-linux on your system. after finding out the offset just use the offset option in mount. Geordy also let me know that volume 27:2 (Summer 2010) of 2600 magazine (towards the back of the issue) there is more clever usage of the loop back file system with regard to mounting an ISO as writable and tweaking some settings with it. ]
z80sim — Z80 Simulator/Debugger for the Zipit Z2
[ Twentyfifth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 20/06/10]
As many of you might know i'm very old-skool and a bit of a Z80 and CP/M fanboy. So when I had a few minutes between world cup football games this morning I decided to see if I could get YAZE or z80pack running on the Zipit (If the Z2 had a few more pixel rows i'd be ecstatic as then I could use it to emulate a TRaSh80 model 3/4, Grundy Newbrain, Camputers Lynx and a few others of my favourite 80s home micros) because if I can't get full machine emulation maybe I can have CP/M 2.2 or CP/M3 on my Zipit.
After a few false starts I got both YAZE and z80pack compiled and running and after a bit of playing I decided that I currently like z80pack better as it's more faithful to the z80 and CP/M experience and has a lot of things available for it.
I'm working on packaging it but in the meantime if you want to have a little play with the emulator and debugger then you can find the binary for IZ2S/EZ2S here