getting into 200 lx bios?

[wildpig]

i figure this thing must have like a small bios that you can get in at boot somehow. anyone knows? thanks

[LMMT]

Check here: http://www.palmtoppaper.com/ptphtml/index.htm
I am sure you can find what you need reading all the magazines.

[Dave Britten]

Not in the sense that you would expect from a traditional PC. It loads an execute-in-place (I think) MS-DOS 5.0 from ROM, after which you can press Alt for "boot options". This allows you to select which drive will be used for config.sys and autoexec.bat. Beyond that, any other hardware configuration is done from the Setup program (such as changing memory allocation), or from the command line (like setting a password).

The Omnibook 300 doesn't have a traditional BIOS setup program either, though I believe it has a self-test.

[wildpig]

I press crl-c like the good old day during boot to interrupt the loading of autoexec. then i don't have to deal with the hp shell using up precious ram when trying to run dos program. i would have about 620K ram free after that.

I guess there's not much point to having more ram since this thing won't do protected mode and a lot of programs don't use ems anyway.

[Dave Britten]

There are simpler ways around that.

1. Copy config.sys and autoexec.bat from D: to C:, and modify them as desired. Press Alt during boot to set C: as the default startup drive. If you remove cic100 and llras from autoexec.bat, you can have just over 410 KB free via Filer-Menu-Options-DOS. And if you remove 200 from the end, it won't automatically start Sytem Manager.

2. Press More-Menu-Application-Terminate All to totally close System Manager and have around 610 KB free. You don't have to worry about DOS=HIGH, since DOS is in ROM mapped to the UMA anyway.

3. Tweak DOS memory from Setup, or put a pipe character (shift-backslash) followed by a number immediately after an application's path in App Manager to give it that much DOS memory. I have DataPerfect with |384, for example.

Once you get used to the ways of handling DOS programs, you'll probably find that RAM is rarely an issue. Most programs from the 8086/80186 days aren't all that memory hungry.

[wildpig]

Using Derive for dos to calculate the general solution to inverse of a 4x4 matrix cause the memory to dip as low as 10% so far on the 200lx. I don't know if it will not run out of mem as it's been calculating for the last 6 hrs. I hope the battery will last that long

similar calc took 0.4 s on my core i7 2600k with derive 6.1 taking up 550MB ram.

I just had derive 6.1 do a general solution for a quartic equation. took 635 s. won't even try this on 200 lx.

derive 6.1 rightly refused to start calculating for the general solution for a quintic equation...

Might have to see if the 50G can handle symbolic inverse of a 4x4 matrix or solve for general solution of a quartic equation.

Edited: 4 Sept 2012, 8:09 a.m.

[Dave Britten]

Yikes, I think your only option there would be to find a unit that's been upgraded to 32-64 MB and run software that can make extensive use of EMS. There's an EMS driver that should be pretty fast, as it can use the Hornet chip to directly map pages in and out of address space, without having to blit memory contents back and forth.

[Bill (Smithville, NJ)]

You might want to check the programs on The Palmtop Network - many of them include source code that you might find useful:

The Palmtop Network

Check out the Programmers Application Library (PAL) on the Palmtop Network.

Hp made available a complete Deleloper's Kit for the HP-95. Did they ever do the same for the HP-200LX?

Dr. Richard L. Dubs did a routine for the PCMCIA and INT 13 Hard Disk Services and was able to get Minux to boot, let you login and then crash. He published the source code - but his web site has long gone missing. I have a copy of it somewhere, if you want to play with that. Just send me an email thru the site and I'll send it to you.

Bill