Thanks Larry and new_castle_j. By the way new_castle_j, what is your first name? The system new_castle_j is running is based on the ICM CPZ-186 16-bit master running at 8MHz, and I'm not sure about the number of slaves he is running. But they are 6MHz Z80 128K memory slaves that are memory mapped into the masters memory space, and data packets between master and slave is transfered by way of either an LDIR instruction for Z80 masters or block xfer with the 80186 master. On the Z80 masters I did use the DMA chips memory-to-memory transfer capability and that was even faster. But ICM was the only company that was doing memory mapped slaves. Everyone else was using I/O transfers, which as much slower. I brought the memory mapping technology with me from Tarbell Electronics when I designed his Z80 CPU board and Double density board. There is also a memory disk for TurboDOS if you have the extra memory. It has to be linear addressed memory, not I/O block selected type, for it to work. The file name is TURBO.REL and the config code is called TURDSK.MAC and those files go all the way back to TurboDOS V1.22
I'm going to get a hold of Bob Ruiz and Ron Tozaki and see if either of them still have any information from those days. I do have some myself, mostly stuff from when ICM bought MuSYS,
but not much stuff related to the ICM product line. I do have a copy of the SAS-200 schematic, and some Personality board info. The quintesential book on TurboDOS configuration info is a book named TurboDOS_Configuration_Manual_Jun86.pdf written by Don Shulz, Steve Rasmussen, and Anne Wang. Mostly geared toward ICM products, but in general a great help in trying to figure out the configuration info for TurboDOS. I'll also have to ask Don if he still has any ICM info. The great thing about ICM was that most all of us are still in contact with each other. The only one I'm aware of gone now is Sam Calvillo, our marketing VP and brother-in-Law of Bob's. Sam passed away about 3 years ago.
As for me, I'm retired now, living in Prescott AZ, and have rekindled my interest in all things CPM/TurboDOS. Just what I need, another hobby on top of my Ham Radio interest. I'm also a member of Linkedin if you want to see what I've been doing since the ICM days. It's under the name Jerry Mulchin.
I'm currently running a P112 board with the GIDE interface and 174Mb of disk storage on a ZSDOS O/S. While the ZSDOS stuff seems to run OK, it is just not TurboDOS, which is much more of an elegent O/S to work with. So I will probably design a complete new set of hardware for the TurboDOS side of things. I haven't decided about the 16-bit master stuff yet. I'll just tackle the Z80 side first. Will probably use a 80S180 CPU running at 33MHz and 1MB of memory. I'm also thinking about extending the 80S180's memory space to 4Mbytes using additional memory mapping like in the ICM stuff. Static memory is so cheap now it doesn't make sense to not have a large Memory Disk. Anyway, I've rambled on enough. I'll send a direct email to new_castle_j and see if we can make phone contact.
Later....
Jerry Mulchin