3.2 KiB
CP/M 3 Help System
In this repository, I want to create help files for CP/M 3 and for RomWBW utilities so that a CP/M 3 RomWBW system can have a nice online help.
The CP/M help system
CP/M Version 3 introduced an online help system: HELP.COM. This uses HELP.HLP as its "database", where all help pages are stored.
To use it, just enter
A>HELP
and HELP will show all main topics that are available.
A specific topic can also be called as a command line parameter, e.g.
A>HELP DIR
will open the help page for DIR.
Help pages can have subtopics, e.g. DIR has "BUILT-IN" and "WITHOPTIONS" as subtopics.
A subtopic can either be called directly from the command line or inside HELP, e.g.:
A>HELP DIR BUILT-IN
HELP>DIR BUILT-IN
or after calling the main topic, a subtopic can be called with a dot as prefix, e.g.:
HELP>DIR
...
HELP>.BUILT-IN
Subtopics by itself can also have subtopics, e.g. DIR BUILT-IN has EXAMPLES as subtopic, here the same applies as before:
A>HELP DIR BUILT-IN EXAMPLES
HELP>DIR BUILT-IN EXAMPLES
HELP>DIR
...
HELP>.BUILT-IN
...
HELP>.EXAMPLES
See the help for HELP for more information :)
Creating HELP pages
A help page file starts with a blank line.
The next line start with ///1TOPIC
.
The content of the page follows.
Subtopics are placed below, starting with a blank line followed by ///2SUBTOPIC
.
e.g.:
///1ASSIGN
Syntax:
ASSIGN D:[=[{D:|<device>[<unitnum>]:[<slicenum>]}]][,...]
...
///2EXAMPLES
Examples...
Creating the help file database
In CP/M
In the standard Digital Research CP/M 3 source code, all help pages are kept together in one
file, HELP.DAT
.
To create the help database (HELP.HLP
), there are two ways in CP/M:
Either use MINHLP.COM
to create this file, but I could not find a .COM file of it and had
problems compiling and using the PL/M source code file.
The other CP/M way is to use HELP.COM
with the parameter [C]
which also compiles HELP.DAT
to HELP.HLP
.
On Linux/Unix
In this repository, the program makehelp
is used to compile HELP.DAT
to HELP.HLP
.
The supplied Makefile
contains all steps neccessary:
- Concatenate all
.help
files from the subdirectoriescpm3
andromwbw
to formHELP.DAT
- While doing this, the line endings will be converted from Unix (LF) to DOS (CRLF) using
dos2unix
- note thatdos2unix
has to be available on the system! - Run
makehelp
to compileHELP.DAT
The resulting HELP.HLP
can now be copied to the CP/M file system, next to HELP.COM
.
License
Makehelp is taken from this repository: https://github.com/durgadas311/MmsCpm3
The license is as following:
Copyright 2011,2017 Douglas Miller durgadas311@gmail.com
Permission to modify and/or redistribute is granted provided no fee is charged, original copyright messages are included, and modifications are submitted back to original author.
The original CP/M 3 help files are Copyright 1980,1984 Digital Research, Inc.
The RomWBW help file contents is in part by
- Wayne Warthen (wwarthen@gmail.com)
- Anna Christina Naß (acn@acn.wtf)