HP 95LX - will surely become more collectible

[Charles C(UK)]

I acquired an HP 95LX pocket PC recently and was very pleasantly surprised at its all round usability and quality, given that these devices have often been sold for flea market prices in recent times.

It has "made in the USA" on the back and a keyboard of similar quality to my HP48S. Its display contrast is rather better than that of the 48S. The built in RPN calculator app. is excellent and Lotus 123 is decent enough for anybody raised on that program.

So far I have built a working serial cable from the auxiliary white connector from an old CD ROM drive cable grafted onto a 9-way RS232 cable. With this I was able to install the driver file (downloadable in sundrv.zip) that allows a small capacity Sandisk Compact Flash card to be accessed via a PCMCIA adapter in the card slot. Thus, I have good device connectivity and back up options.

My latest success with the device is to install the demo version of BBC Basic 86. The built in assembler of this venerable interpreted Basic allows access to pixel graphics via INT 5F ROM BIOS calls.

I can put up some more details of this method if anybody is interested.

Edited: 10 Sept 2013, 10:08 a.m. after one or more responses were posted

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

I used one back when they where a current product, and while it was quite usable I found that it went through batteries quite quickly and when the main battery went flat, the backup battery followed shortly after. I kept all my data on a RAM card that had a separate backup battery so I would not lose all my data every time the batteries went flat.

[robert rozee]

but today you can drop in a pair of high capacity Ni-Mh AA cells, and add a small resistor to charge them at a suitable low rate.

i've used the turbo pascal 5.5 command-line compiler with good success, and have somewhere a copy of a replacement crt.pas unit for nicely talking to the display.

in my opinion, the 95LX screen (40x16) was of much superior readability to that of the later 200LX. the later screen (80x25) had characters that were just too small, and lacked contrast in all but the best lighting conditions.

[Karl-Ludwig Butte]

Hi Robert,

I used Turbo Pascal a lot in the good old days und would like to do some programming with it on my 95LX. Do you know where the command line compiler and especially the replacement crt.pas unit for the 95LX is available for download at the internet?

Thank you very much for a short feedback in advance.

Best regards

Karl

[robert rozee]

turbo pascal 5.5 has been released as 'abandonware' by embarcadero (who were formerly borland), and is available via the following link:

http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20803

to complete the download you need to sign up, but this is free. there are many replacement crt.pas units out there, the one i have is one that i wrote myself - i'll have a look to see if i can find it. the main thing is that it (a) worked entirely through bios calls to write to the screen, and (b) implemented millisecond time delays in a way that was independent of processor speed. turbo pascal's crt.pas units have traditionally always been plagued with problems of locking up when used on a pc that was too fast.

[Karl-Ludwig Butte]

Hi Robert,

thank you very much for the link. I didn't noticed the change from Borland to embarcadero. I'm going to download the file and search for a fitting crt.pas. I know of the timing problems Turbo Pascal had in the past 'cause I developed data transmission software at the time and we had a lot of problems with the timing in the beginning. Later, Borland published a patch, which cured at least some of them. Boy, this'll feel a lot like the good old times.

Thanks again.

Best regards

Karl

[John Ioannidis]

Good thing I never throw anything away :)

[BruceH]

Quote:

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I acquired an HP 95LX pocket PC recently ...

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If you plan to use it at all regularly then Buddy95 is a must.

[Bill (Smithville, NJ)]

Quote:

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If you plan to use it at all regularly then Buddy95 is a must.

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I agree. Buddy is almost a requirement for the Hp-95/100/200LX series. You can find the files at:

Buddy

If you are new to the 95LX, then check out the HP Palmtopper Site:

PalmTopper Paper

Bill

[Dave Britten]

I'd suggest looking for a book on Lotus 1-2-3 (the 95LX is based on release 2.2). It's surprisingly useful, even today.