After encapsulating operating systems like MS-DOS into container, I decided to go one step further back in history. Now I am extending ancient to the Zilog Z80 processor. At the time Amstrad had some Z80 based machines on the market. They were called Joyce and Anne. So why not put them into a container.
To allow old CP/M applications to run (for nostalgia reasons) and to ensure that old operating system can participate in CI/CD scenarios. In this project I am not using qemu but go for the very nice Amstrad Joyce / Anne emulator by John Elliot. With that it is possible to encapsulate and automate workloads that run on the CP/M operating system which dates back to the 1980-ies.
- OCI container image based on Debian Linux
- two step container build, with a builder step compiling of Joyce for Unix and the actual packaging step
- some helper tools and scripts
podman build .
or
docker build .
Then tag the resulting image as you like
podman tag <image hash> debian-joyce:1.0
or
docker tag <image hash> debian-joyce:1.0
To prepare your working qemu hard disk image, you need some boot floppy images to bootstrap your environment. Place them in a place that you will then volume mount into the container. To persist the resulting qcow2 image, make sure to mount /tmp/images into the container.
Example:
podman run -it --rm \
-p 5901:5901 \
-v /host-machine/some-floppy-path:/tmp/floppies \
debian-joyce:1.0
Some wrapper shell scripts are included. They illustrate how to work with the container. The GUI of the image / the screen is exposed via VNC on display :1 (= port 5901).