Question for HP 9826 owners - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

29 Nov 2001

Joe

...
 >I have the binaries for HP-9826 HPL. Copied them
onto floppy disks,  
...
  What did you copy them from?  When you say that you
have the binaries,
 what exactly do you mean? The only binaries that I've seen for the 9826 are
 the .BIN files that are used with BASIC. They're language extentions and
 device divers files that can be included in the main OS file or loaded
 separately. But HPL is a complete stand alone OS and it doesn't use .BIN
 files 
I have the HPL system file and drivers and also copies of Basic 4 system
and associated .BIN, .PROG files etc. The files were very kindly emailed
to me by Brian Skilton in the UK who got them as disk copies from Bruce
Rodgers. Thanks to both Brian and Bruce. Brian used lif2dos or lifutil to
make DOS copies and made a note of the file descriptor bytes (11th and
12th byte in the directory entry). I copied the files onto LIF formatted disks
and edited the file descriptor byte. Success ! Basic 4 boots and loads.

Tried the same with HPL and got the FFFFFFC4 error message.

...
  Why did you edit them? Lifutil is erratic. The problem
is that HP used
 lots of different formats for LIF files and the file descriptor byte is
 loaded in different places in different LIF files and Lifutil can't find
 many of them so it doesn't accurately interpet the file structure therefore
 it frequently "scrambles" files. 
That makes a lot of sense and could explain the problem. Brian has
also sent me the directory listing for the two HPL disks using lifutil to
catalogue them. Note: file descriptor bytes appear under date field. 

Disk 1
Volume Label: H9826
File Name      Pro Type      Rec/file  byte/rec Address    Date  Time
SYSTEM_HPL    SYSTM   433        256       16             E9 42

Disk 2
Volume Label: V4
File Name      Pro Type      Rec/file  byte/rec Address    Date  Time
revid                  -6128          1          256      12             E8 10
cbackup            -6124          16         256     13             E8 14
ibackup             -6124          21         256     29             E8 14
9825key            -6128          11         256     50             E8 10
9876chars         -6128           2          256     61             E8 10  

I had noticed that the first used sector on disk 2 is 12 and not 16 but
I wouldn't have thought that would make much difference. Besides, I
havn't got to disk 2 yet.

I guess there must be a few more bytes that need editing. I will see if
Brian can send me a hex dump of the directory sector and go through
it byte by byte.

Chris