About
Devpac80 is HiSoft’s Z80 development kit, in a version prepared for the Tatung Einstein. The disc’s own READ.ME is headed “HiSoft Devpac80 for the Tatung Einstein”. It has three tools:
- GEN80, the assembler: “GEN80 1.06 Copyright (C) HiSoft 1985”.
- ED80, a full-screen editor with a help file. The Einstein version uses DEL to delete the last character, so deleting a whole line moves to SHIFT DEL or CTRL Z.
- MON80, a machine-code monitor and debugger: “MON80 1.05 (C) HiSoft 1985”, with a disassembler, breakpoints, memory search and fill.
Each tool has an installation program for changing its keys and screen settings. There is also an Einstein patch for ED80 and MON80 with its assembly source, and KBDASC and KBDNORM, which switch the Einstein’s character set to standard ASCII (so the key marked one quarter gives an open curly bracket) and back. The manual is in the library separately as the ED80 Manual.
Running It
The disc does not start the Einstein by itself. Boot any XtalDOS disc in drive 0, put this disc in drive 1 and type 1:, then GEN80, ED80 filename or MON80. ED80 JABBER.WOK opens the sample text supplied for practice: Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.
Files in the Package
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
DEVPAC80_SIDE1.scp / .mfi / .dsk | the side read first: flux capture, MAME image, sector image |
DEVPAC80_SIDE2.scp / .mfi / .dsk | the other side, the same three |
README.txt | details of the dump, the file list and checksums |
About this Dump
Dumped on 27 September 2026 with a Greaseweazle V4 and an original Einstein 3″ drive; every sector on both sides read cleanly on the first pass. The disc has blank labels and is probably a working copy of HiSoft’s distribution rather than an original: no file is read-only, and the two sides were formatted differently. Both sides hold the same 18 files, byte for byte, all of them HiSoft’s. With no labels there is no telling side A from side B, so the images are named by the order they were read.
Can You Help? An Original Disc
If you have an original HiSoft Devpac80 disc for the Einstein, with its label and packaging, we would love to dump it so the library holds the release as HiSoft shipped it. Please get in touch.
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