New find; HP HyperViper

Hello Bernd, I'm still experimenting with the Viper system. The HyperViper is a real pleasure to use! Today I hooked up a couple of different external HP-IB hard drives and tested them. Two of them were untested and it turned out that both were bad :-( The third one is an old reliable standby HP7958B with HPL, three different configurations of HP BASIC 4, BASIC 5 and BASIC 6 installed on it. At first I couldn't see the drive when the HV started looking for operating systems but I was able to CATalog the drive after it booted the Rocky Mountain BASIC from the PC's hard drive. It took me a while to figure out why I couldn't see the external drive when the HV booted. I finally realized that it was booting so fast that I never saw the list of OSs on the external drive! The funny thing is that it showed the OS of the PC drive for several seconds before it booted but it booted IMMEDIATELY after showing the OSs on the HP-IB drive. I found that I had to press the space bar on the keyboard as soon as the Boot ROM kicked in and started showing system devices. Pressing the space bar stops it from booting after it shows the OSs. At that point you can boot any OS that you choose (same as any HP 9000 200/300). Anyway I was able to do a SYSTEM STORE of the RMB to the HP-IB drive and then boot it from that drive. It appears to work exactly the same as the copy loaded from the PC's hard drive. I could also boot BASIC 4 and BASIC 5 but the display was shrunken vertically on all of them. One configuration of BASIC 4 worked ok but the others of BASIC 4 and BASIC 5 all filled the blank areas of the screen with various characters when you did a CAT. However they all did seem to run. BASIC 6 was the real surprise. It definetly didn't like it! As soon as it started to load, the machine would jump back to DOS. Under normal conditions you CAN jump back to DOS but you should be able to go right back to RMB and your OS and application will still be running as if nothing happened. But in this case, you couldn't go back to RMB until you powered down the system and powered it up again and rerun the device driver and loader. The loader said that RMB was still running but you never could access it again. HPL was just as bad, when I tried to load it the screen cleared and the machine appeared to lock up. I couldn't switch back to DOS and Control-Alt-Delete didn't have any effect. IIRC HPL has a similar effect on the HP 9000 300s. HPL is only supposed to run on the 9826 and 9836. I think it will work on a 9816 but I don't think it will even run on the other 9000 200s such as the 217 and 237. I haven't tried Pascal yet. I have it on a drive but it's on another system and it will be a pain to get to. But I'll probably dig it out tomorrow and try it. I found a long list of optional parameters in the loader program (BASIC) including things like SELFTEST, MENU, SHORT, LONG and others but none of them appears to do anything. Anybody know anything about them? Joe At 06:10 PM 4/22/04 +0200, you wrote: I'm not sure but I believe it will. I think I remember reading that it will boot an OS from an external HP-IB drive just like a regular 9000/200 will. I need to dig out a drive and try it. Joe