The WP-1 is a 1985 word processing appliance: a simple Z180 computer with an amber letterbox character screen and 3.5" floppy disk drive built in to a daisywheel typewriter chassis. It's got 64kB of RAM and a 91x15 screen, with an excellent keyboard attached.
It's not really supposed to boot from floppy but Brother did release a small amount of software for it, including an almost useless BASIC interpreter which was unable to load or save programs and a typing tutor. I've managed to reverse engineer the executable format and have cpmish working on it.
Sadly, this series of typewriters doesn't use ordinary 720kB or 1440kB DOS floppies --- anything but! It's a custom GCR encoding scheme (implemented in software!) which PC floppy disk drive controllers won't touch. Luckily you can write these disks with a FluxEngine, but you'll need to build a $10-15 board to connect a PC drive to to do that. See the FluxEngine Brother documentation for more information. (You'll need it.)
What you get with this port:
- about 109kB of storage on a 120kB GCR disk (I have to reserve three tracks for the Brother's proprietary filesystem to boot from)
- most of an ADM-3a / Kaypro II terminal emulator supporting 90x15 text
- a pitiful 36kB TPA
- a non-interrupt driven keyboard which drops keypresses if the machine's busy
- a blinking cursor
- bugs
What you don't get:
- disk writing (the Brother system call for writing sectors seems to randomly corrupt the disk)
- sysgen, format etc
- no bugs
As you may gather, it's all a bit fragile.
Build cpmish.
Use FluxEngine to write this to a DD 3.5" floppy, using a command line like:
fluxengine write brother120 -i wp1.img
Insert the disk into the machine's drive, and then power on while holding CODE+Q. The machine will boot from the disk.
Big warning: if you save any Brother files onto the disk, you'll irrevocably corrupt the CP/M filesystem. Don't do this.
You can replace the CCP and BIOS with your own if you like, although you do need to do this from Linux (because I haven't written the CP/M tools for this yet). They should be written onto the disk at offset 0x000d00.
The machine has a Z180 with 512MB of address space. The RAM is at 0x20000 to 0x2ffff, physical. cpmish lives from 0x27000 to 0x2ffff so as not to step on the Brother OS's toes, which uses 0x20000 to 0x26fff for workspace; we rely on it to do disk handling, as both are complex to use. Hence the very small TPA.
It'd be theoretically possible to dispense with the Brother OS entirely, and access all the hardware ourselves. This would require reverse engineering the details of how the floppy 'controller' works; this is done almost entirely in software, so we'd need to reproduce all the code for encoding/decoding flux patterns on the disk, etc; we'd also need to duplicate Brother's frankly crazy microstepping logic for finding tracks on the disk (the drives don't have adequate alignment, and make up for it by moving the head a fraction of a track until they get a clean read!).
The terminal emulator is ADM-3a with some Kaypro II extensions. Currently display attributes aren't supported.
Everything here was written by me, David Given, and is covered under the terms of the whole CP/Mish project. See the documentation in the project root for more information.