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Cheap PCMCIA memory mode 32MB flashcards

H

hideki

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May 27, 2010
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Hihi

(just found this forum)

Got an HP 95LX recently and on the quest for a suitable card for it so I could have more than 200K of files on the machine I went hunting through eBay sellers as you do, found these:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280511936885

$24.95 in that monopoly money that passes as currency across the pond (he also added a lower international postage option after I questioned the huge charge of $45.45 to the UK, so now $7.64 to get to the UK at least and it was here in 6 days)

These cards are not supported natively by the HP 95LX but they can be used with the Sundisk drivers

(they also work with the Olivetti Quaderno and the Sharp PC3000/3100 apparently)

I've been moving data (very slowly) onto mine at 19200 for the past couple of days, no errors yet

Drivers should be attached to this post if anyone wants to take the plunge, they'll work only with
memory mode capable PCMCIA flash cards and with the exception of the patched HP95 driver included are vendor locked to Sundisk/Sandisk

Hrm, seems I can't attach archives, or rar archives anyway

Grab driver from http://www.hidnet.org.uk/sundrv.rar if you want it
 
I have both a Sharp PC 3000 and an HP95LX. I looked for many years for this card for my PC3000 ( I call it an Atari Portfolio-2 since Tramiel rejected the DIP (developer of the Portfolio) offering and Sharp scooped it up) and my card stopped functioning after I tried to format it. Prices were always prohibitive. The PC3000 website also has the Sun driver. Some users got it working with a CF card adaptor which I presently use with an HP Omnibook 4000C. I haven't tried it on either the PC3000 or the HP95LX altho it does fit (a bit tight since it's a PCMCIA 2 connection as mentioned on the PC3000 site and both the PC3k and 95LX have a slot 1 socket) and I imagine it needs the sun driver, installed I suppose in ram. From what I remember they both have a fixed memory allocation altho there might be a solution with a driver for partitioned cards. I can't find the German PC3000 URL at the moment but a Google should find it. They have many files in their archives. Perhaps some that would work with the 95LX. There's also a German developer who among other things wrote a driver for Omega Zip drives on the Portfolio and IIRC a Palm using the parallel port. He also sent me one for the PC3000. I wonder whether they could be used with a suitable adaptor on the 95LXs.

I recently ran across a recycler who has a couple of the cards, but he's in Winnipeg, my closest large city 350mi. away so I hope he still has them when I go in around the middle of next month. Last time I was in I found to my dismay that even CF cards are now hard to find since they've been supplanted by SD cards.

The price offered on the Ebay posting is a little pricey but not too bad when you consider the going price for USB bullets. His original shipping price tho is outrageous and certainly does not reflect actual cost. That makes me a bit wary of him. Like many Americans he doesn't recognise Canada as a foreign country so he doesn't include Canada on his list of international shipping.
Let us know the outcome of your efforts. There are a lot of excellent programs for the 95LX if one has the storage space, and of course it has Lotus 123 installed and ACT, the notable PIM app. has a 95LX version.

Lawrence

MODERATORS PLEASE NOTE. I ALSO WAS UNABLE TO MAKE AN IMAGE ATTACHMENT TO A POSTING RECENTLY !!
 
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Hihi

It's working quite nicely actually, see pic which may or may not appear here:

hp95lx.jpg


Got a few compilers and tasm, a full set of infocom z-code games along with ports of frotz and emacs that work well in 40x16 and handful of other games and utilities on the device, 12 of 32MB ish used

I have a number of other handheld machines in my collection but the only one similar to this is the atari portfolio but that's limited to 128K RAM and a 64K ramcard, even with 512K this machine is a vast improvement and twice the display, I'm going to write a bit of software for it anyway, perhaps a lib to do 4x6 text in graphics mode to give 60x21 rather than 40x16 and persuade frotz and the hp95 emacs to work with it, also write a file manager in the style of X-Tree Gold/Z-Tree using the same font, something the machine sorely needs, if I'm still interested after that might try my hand at a basic gui in the style of ST Gem (although not able to do much, just a shell, basic file operations, launching, text viewing perhaps but the built in system manager isn't exactly amazing in that respect so the bar is set pretty low there, lol)

managed to find suitable replacements for join, subst, ansi.sys etc. from other sources too (although no working doskey or mem)

Programming wise, Personal C compiler 1.2, TASM 4.0, QuickBasic 4.5, ASIC 5, BBC Basic 86 (which contains an excellent 8086 assembler) and of course debug and whatever is built into emacs (possibly lisp, not sure what this emacs is like...)

The seller explained that the price was high because ebay require the use of priority mail on international shipments? I'm not sure, I only buy, never sell on there but given the maximum card usable with the HP95 is a 32MB card supporting memory mode access they seem ideal given that larger ones won't work and smaller ones are less useful, what I could do with is the 128K masked rom card sundisk made with the drivers for these on it so I don't have to find a serial connected machine every time my code stomps all over the ramdisk

If people here are really still interested in the machine I'll make source and binaries for anything I produce available (probably under GPL2) for anyone who can make some use of them but a lot will be fairly optimised for the HP graphics mode and 4/8 pixel wide fonts

A Poqet pc and a sharp 3000/3100 will certainly be on my list of future purchases along with a 100LX (200LX seem quite pricey)
 
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Wow that's beautiful. And it uses the whole card. If this reseller thing doesn't work out I have to get one. Hell I'll likely get one anyway, I have a slew of apps I could put on them. There's a lot still available, it was a popular medium. There was an excellent site on Compuserve which closed shop last summer taking the site with them. The guy that had it up wrote an excellent users guide formatted as a help file. I found it superior to the HP one. He had also written My Buddy and a slew of other apps which he called the utilities pack. Fortunately I downloaded all his apps and the help file before compuserve folded. The guys name was R. Harvey. I also downloaded the connectivity pack as well as others from the usual sites including the funet HP95lx site. The HP Museum has the manuals and other stuff. PM me if you are looking for any programs now lost.

Lawrence
 
Hihi

Aye, that's why the larger cards won't work, the SDISK/SFORMAT commands can only allocate the entire card as one partition (and with 4K clusters when a 32MB card would work perfectly well with 512 byte clusters given there'd be just under 2^16 of them) so it's smaller than 32 or 32 on the 95LX (although the 100LX and later don't suffer from this limitation and will work with a PCMCIA to CF adapter and ordinary CF card apparently)

Got MASM and Turbo C++ 1.01 (seriously) on there as well as the other stuff now, lol, I found a number of websites with software for this machine but nobody seems to have made any effort to work around the display limitations with it or the lack of a proper graphical interface (a menu with static .PCX that waits for keypresses doesn't count -.-), the trouble with that is developing on the PC to run on the HP 95 when the graphics modes aren't supported, I suppose I'll just have to have it use a CGA mode if available or the HP one as far as testing goes

I think I have the utility pack, found it in the course of my searching while waiting for the machine to arrive, 95utils it was called with various small tools, tried a few of them

I'm using an app called FILELINK atm (along with the usual xmodem in hyperterminal to transfer initially files using the built in terminal), I think it came with FreeDOS but I'm really not sure where I got it... it's slightly irritating the number of comms apps that refuse to work with the not particularly standard serial port though (it's not just the lack of hardware handshaking, there are other interrupt related issues with it)

Can't seem to find an hp95 area on funet.fi but perhaps it's long gone, that said given how old a lot of the other content is I'd expect it to be there somewhere...

The V20 in this machine is apparently capable of running CP/M (8080) binaries with the appropriate launching utility, don't suppose you know what that is or where it might be found?

Thanks for the offer, a PM is on its way...
 
Just an added note re: the Portfolio. There are/were 128k memory cards. Most of the major Atari dealers have them, but the 128 cards tend to be expensive unless you can find another source. There is also an Atari peripheral called the"Memory Expander Plus". It adds 256k of memory to the Portfolio's standard 128k, Giving you a total of 384. A second Memory expander which can be daisy-chained could increase your ram to 640k, but it's not very practical since they would protrude about 4" from the side. The Memory Expander also has a card-slot on the side for the memory cards which appears as a B: drive when occupied. The Portfolio's built-in apps. have a 64k limit in creation and the Expander cannot increase that limit.

The Expander doesn't work like the memory cards A: and B; which are only storage but extends the PoFo's main working memory used to load programs and manipulate data. It takes it's power from the PoFo and retains it's memory even when the PoFo is turned off, but loses it like the poFo's internal ram if it loses power or is unplugged. That is where the battery-powerred memory cards come in.

Another neat thing is Klaus Peichl's program which allows you to use the parallel port adaptor to access Iomega Zip drives. He also has some other interesting items on his site: http://leute.server.de/pfe.htm

I have all of the above as well as an Atari memory-card reader/writer attached to an older PC. I've always loved upgrading old computers to the max.

Lawrence
 
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Hi Lawrence -

Is it possible that http://leute.server.de/pfe.htm is mangled?

I'm quite interested in this thread - I had a Portfolio that I bought new in the 90s.
When I added the Memory Expander Plus, it locked it up cold, permanently. Atari's
awesome customer service did the rest - I recently gave it away, but I'm curious
if the story resonates with anyone...

Jack
 
Makes me sad, wish I hadn't sold my 200LX a decade ago...

I used to do my college FORTRAN compiling on it. It was faster than waiting for the network compiler to become available. (30 desktop lab, only 5 compiler licenses, so you had to queue up to use the compiler.) The 100LX and 200LX had the benefit of having a full 640x200 screen, so could do 80x25, and full res mono CGA mode.

Also got Windows 3.0 running on it, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0.
 
Anonymous Freak said:
Makes me sad, wish I hadn't sold my 200LX a decade ago...

I used to do my college FORTRAN compiling on it. It was faster than waiting for the network compiler to become available. (30 desktop lab, only 5 compiler licenses, so you had to queue up to use the compiler.) The 100LX and 200LX had the benefit of having a full 640x200 screen, so could do 80x25, and full res mono CGA mode.

Also got Windows 3.0 running on it, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0.
Click to expand...

I had a 200LX for a few years, and I just sold it a few weeks ago on eBay... I miss it.

I had a 64MB SanDisk on a CF->PCMCIA adapter, with a few DOS programming tools. I also had a few games, including Zak McKracken, Prince of Persia, and Flight Sim 4.0 on it. Windows 3.0 actually looked decent, once you got the program windows sized properly within the 640x200 CGA region.
 
If it's a factor, the HP 200LX will handle a 4 GB card.

Perhaps more, but I'm sure about 4GB.

Jack
 
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