HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Printable Version +- HP Forums (https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum) +-- Forum: HP Calculators (and very old HP Computers) (/forum-3.html) +--- Forum: General Forum (/forum-4.html) +--- Thread: HP 75 and the PIL-Box (/thread-286.html) Pages: 1 2 |
HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Michael Fehlhammer - 12-31-2013 02:39 AM Today I copied a lot of files between an HP 75 and a PC, connected through a PIL box. It was an incredibly tedious task: a single file of 1000 bytes took about 20 seconds in average ( both directions ) ! I remember the HP 71b to accomplish that one order of magnitude faster! I tried two PCs ( Windows Vista and 7 ), two PIL- Boxes and two HP 75 ( C and D), always the same result. My PIL-Boxes are jumpered to support 115 kbs baud rate. Any ideas why the HP 75 / PIL-box combo is so slow? Or did anyone experience a significantly higher speed ? RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Sylvain Cote - 12-31-2013 04:03 AM Hello Michael, I just did the following quick tests ... 1) HP-75C connected to a HP-9114B with a LIF formatted 720K floppy -> it took around 2 seconds to write a 1.5KB file 2) HP-75C connected to a PIL-Box (115K) and to ILPer v1.43 -> it took around 33 seconds to write a 1.5KB file 3) HP-71B connected to a HP-9114B with a LIF formatted 720K floppy -> it took around 2 seconds to write a 1.4KB file 4) HP-71B connected to a PIL-Box (115K) and to ILPer v1.43 -> it took around 30 seconds to write a 1.4KB file So the delay is coming either from the PIL-Box or from the ILPer simulator or both. Best regards, Sylvain RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Michael Fehlhammer - 12-31-2013 04:36 AM Thank you for testing and reporting the results, Sylvain! I think we should forward these figures to J.F. Garnier and Christoph Gießelink. Maybe they are reading? Next interesting comparison could be: Jeff's older version of ILPER (without TCP connection) versus Christoph's version. I can't recall that anyone has ever mentioned that a PIL-Box connection (to a modern hard disk) is more than 10 times (!!) slower than a good old 9114 disk drive. RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Sylvain Cote - 12-31-2013 03:08 PM Further tests ... Setup ... 71 test file: KEYBOARD,LEX,1.4KB 75 test file: MYFILE,BAS,1.5KB HP-75C: [VER$ -> aaaaaa] HP-71B: [VER$ -> HP71:1BBBB HPIL:1B] Emu71: v1.04 for Windows [VER$ -> HP71:2CDCC HPIL:1B] Emu71: v2.41 for DOS [VER$ -> HP71:2CDCC HPIL:1B] HP-9114B: Build date -> Y:1985 W:41 ILPer for Windows: v1.43 PIL-Box: v1.4 Tests ... [ write-to: -> ] [ read-from: <- ] ------------------------------------------------------ HP75C -> HP-9114B = ~2 sec. HP75C <- HP-9114B = ~2 sec. ------------------------------------------------------ HP71B -> HP-9114B = ~2 sec. HP71B <- HP-9114B = ~2 sec. ------------------------------------------------------ Emu71 Win -> ILPer = ~2 sec. Emu71 Win <- ILPer = ~2 sec. ------------------------------------------------------ Emu71 DOS -> HDRIVE1 = ~1 sec. Emu71 DOS <- HDRIVE1 = ~1 sec. ------------------------------------------------------ HP75C -> PIL-Box (115Kbps) -> ILPer = ~33 sec. HP75C <- PIL-Box (115Kbps) <- ILPer = ~29 sec. ------------------------------------------------------ HP71B -> PIL-Box (115Kbps) -> ILPer = ~30 sec. HP71B <- PIL-Box (115Kbps) <- ILPer = ~27 sec. ------------------------------------------------------ Emu71 Win -> PIL-Box (115Kbps) -> HP-9114B = ~30 sec. Emu71 Win <- PIL-Box (115Kbps) <- HP-9114B = ~27 sec. ------------------------------------------------------ Emu71 DOS -> PIL-Box (9.6Kbps) -> HP-9114B = ~90 sec. Emu71 DOS <- PIL-Box (9.6Kbps) <- HP-9114B = ~110 sec. ------------------------------------------------------ The above tests tend to demonstrate that the delay is induced by the PIL-Box. Best regards, Sylvain edit1: add write-to and read-from comment edit2: add Emu71 DOS values RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - hp41cx - 01-01-2014 03:01 AM Thanks J.F. Garnier and Christoph Gießelink the excellent interface. It was a great evolution in the communication of my loves. RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Sylvain Cote - 01-01-2014 04:54 PM After more investigation ... I was able to cut the transfer time by three by configuring the FTDI Windows virtual com port. 1) Show Device Manager dialog. [attachment=106] 2) Select the COM port and show Property dialog. [attachment=109] 3) Select Port Setting tab and press the advanced button. [attachment=110] 4) Change the Latency Timer (msec) from 16 to 1 then press all the OK buttons [attachment=111] Best regards, Sylvain RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Ángel Martin - 01-01-2014 06:53 PM Thanks for the pointer Sylvain, I got to try that on my XP machine - lately I've noticed unusually slow Pil-Box response times as well, maybe this helps. Incidentally, if anybody could bend J-F's or Christoph ear to make the ILPer window sizable... I know you can scroll the text window down but it's a shame it can't take advantage of today's larger monitors. Cheers, ÁM RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Michael Fehlhammer - 01-02-2014 12:36 AM Now I have tried several combinations of Windows operating systems (Win 7 ultimate and Win 7 home premium, both 64 bit), FTDI serial driver versions (2.8.30 and 2.8.28 ) and driver setups ( like the modification proposed by Sylvain ), but the transfer never is faster than 33 seconds for a 1550 Bytes HP 75 lex file. Sylvain, which operating system version do you use? You are better by a factor of three, how is that possible? The transfer rate even breaks down further to about 87 seconds for the same file when the medium ( the LIF file on the pc ) isn't almost empty, but contains several files ( in my case: 39 files, about 50 kBytes ). I guess the algorithm to find the next free records on the medium creates a lot of communication, resulting in almost three times as many HP IL frames being sent through the loop. I end up with an effective transfer rate of less than 20 Bytes per second. Obviously there's a lot of handshaking, welcoming, New Year's greeting and Happy Birthday wishing between the box and every single byte ... :-) Did anyone contact J.F. Garnier on that? I'm going to write him an email. RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Sylvain Cote - 01-02-2014 02:28 AM Hello Michael, My setup is the following ... - MacBookPro v6.1 8GB RAM - OSX Mavericks 64 bits v10.9.1 - Parallels Desktop 9 for Mac v9.0.24172 - VM setup: 1 core with 2 GB RAM - Windows 7 Pro 32 bits v6.1+SP1+LastUpdates - FTDI Driver 2.8.28.0 (2013-01-18) In the light of your experiences, just in case, I will redo the latency tests. I will also do some tests with bigger files and with several files on the volume. I should be able to report back tomorrow evening (UTC-5h) with the results. Best regards, Sylvain RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - J-F Garnier - 01-02-2014 04:16 PM The main limitation comes from the FTDI driver, so it is very important to reduce the lantency timer to a minimum (1ms) as pointed out by Sylvain. The second limitation is the serial speed between USB and the PIL-Box uC, using the 115kps setting makes it negligible. With these settings, transfer rate will be in the range of 200-400 bytes/s. Still lower than the real HP hardware and more than enough for the HP-41, but the limited transfer rate is noticeable with the HP71B/HP75. My today's tests with 1 ms timer latency and 115kps PIL-Box settings, using a HP-71B and a 1722 byte test file, show that the transfer rate also depends on the host system: My old Win2K desktop - FTDI 2.08.02 : 9.8s (175 bytes/s) My latest Win8-64bit notebook - FTDI 2.08.30 : 3.8s (450 bytes/s) J-F (to measure transfer rate, I use something like: T=TIME @ COPY xxx TO :2 @ DISP TIME-T) Added: with scope trace disabled in ILPer... RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Christoph Giesselink - 01-02-2014 06:14 PM (01-02-2014 12:36 AM)Michael Fehlhammer Wrote: ... Hello Michael, like Sylvain demonstrated, first we have to check who's responsible for the slow transfer on your system: PIL-Box or ILPer. Therefore a test with Emu71/Win v1.05 with ILPer v1.43 over Virtual IL will show if ILPer is working properly. If ILPer in this configuration is slow, I think about two possibilities. 1st, I assume that you switched off the output in the Scope window by unchecking the Scope checkbox. A parallel data output of the transferred data bytes in the scope window will massively slow down the execution speed. 2nd, perhaps a virus scanner is watching the DAT/LIF file of your virtual disk. From ILPer software design, the DAT/LIF file is normally closed to allow parallel access to this file from Emu41 or Emu71/DOS. On each sector number read or write (256 bytes) the file will be opened and after accessing the sector the file will be closed again. This may trigger a virus scanner and the scanner block the file until it's checked. Or is your DAT/LIF file on an external device like a NAS? Ethernet / WLAN access produce a lot of communication overhead. If the problem is the PIL-Box side, only J-F Ganier may help. I don't know the internals of the PIL-Box, my PIL-Box communication protocol references had been the VB version of ILPer 1.35 (for device mode) and ILCtrl 1.01 (for controller mode). To answer an earlier question in this thread: There's no speed difference between ILPer 1.35.3 (C++ version without TCP) and ILPer 1.43 (C++ version with TCP). Both versions use more or less the same PIL-Box access code. But I don't have any information about the speed issue related to the latest VB version 1.35. RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Michael Fehlhammer - 01-03-2014 12:15 AM Thank you Jean-Francois, thank you Christoph for joining our discussion! Fortunately I finally succeeded in gaining a high transfer rate of almost 400 Bytes per second - and got closer to the root of all evil: I did the following tests: Just Emu71Win and ILPer v.1.43: Copying of a 1.7 kByte file took less than one second! Then my favorite setup: My HP 75c linked to the PIL-Box, ILPILBox (!) running on my Win7-64 machine, (FTDI driver 2.8.30, latency timer 1 ms, 115 k baud rate, IL scope disabled ) linked to ILPer by TCP/IP. I like the flexibility and expandability of that concept. Result: More than two minutes for copying of a 7k file. :-( Finally I omitted the ILPILBox and connected ILPer directly to the PIL-Box. Result: Less than 18 seconds for the same file! Christoph, how can the additional TCP-IP traffic have such a desastrous impact on the overall performance? Since the pure combination Emu71Win - ILPer, also linked by TCP/IP, is extremely fast, it seems to be a problem with ILPILBox ( Version 1.1 ) ? RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Christoph Giesselink - 01-03-2014 01:09 AM (01-03-2014 12:15 AM)Michael Fehlhammer Wrote: ... TNX for your test. I agree that the problem is caused by ILPilbox.exe. The serial implementation for the PIL-Box hardware inside ILPilbox.exe is different from the implementation inside ILPer.exe because with ILPilbox the PIL-Box hardware itself can operate as controller or as device, whereas with ILPer only as device. Edit 01/06/14: I will fix the bug soon. Latest tests more or less show the same transfer time like the PIL-Box directly connected to ILPer. The transfer speed with PIL-Box as controller (Emu71/Win as controller operation) is a little bit slower comparing to the PIL-Box as device/listener, but no speed changes to ILPilbox version v1.2. This is a software design issue of the actual ILPilbox program. RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - danicaB - 01-04-2014 04:57 AM Maybe your PC memory is low. I also experience that so I remove some files. RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Sylvain Cote - 01-04-2014 06:57 PM The following shows the time it take to write 50 files to a media. Setup ... Code:
Values ... Code:
HP-75C & I/O-ROM code ... Code:
Best regards, Sylvain edit: typos RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - J-F Garnier - 01-06-2014 06:14 PM Thanks, Sylvain, for these tests. Globally, the PIL-Box/ILPer is about 3-4 times slower than the 9114, for write operations of a small file. Main limitation is the USB latency, since the HP-IL protocol requires each frame to come back to the sender before the next one can be sent. That is no USB bulk transfer while following the HP-IL protocol. If anyone has a suggession to improve this, I'm interested! J-F RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Oulan - 01-07-2014 08:25 AM Yes the latency is the main problem. For HP-IL, the latency of the medium kill speed. I started to make some experiment on go71b for hp-il over wifi (with patched virtual il programs on a pc), but as the message should travel the whole loop before sending the next, I got a throughput of 5 bytes/sec !! Actually I got some nice usb-serial adapter from FTDI and even usb-usb null modem adapter (it is seen as a serial device at each end with very hight speed). One day I will try some experiments on go71b to look further in implementing HP-IL protocol but only on usb-usb or usb-serial medium as they support android with complete drivers. Perhaps an idea to increase the throughput of the sender is to 'fake' the reply from the loop. If you know exactly what devices are on the loop, you can 'forge' the message after its travel on the loop as soon as you send it (if you make the assumption that all devices are ok and work well). But if you pull off the device .... It can be done with go71b (you can change the behavior of the hp-il stack) or from emu71. This can also be done if the controller is connected directly to a usb/serial virtual il device (you can forge the reply). For PIL-Box, this is quite complicated as you need to rewrite a large part of the driver. For pil-box, you can use this idea: make a special usb device which isolate the 'virtual loop' from the pil-box. This device forge immediately the reply message and then manage the virtual loop itself. No change are needed on the PIL-Box, but it can be quite hard to do for the device code. This can be done for 'virtual loops' but for 'real loops' I don't have any ideas, sorry. Olivier RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Christoph Giesselink - 01-07-2014 07:14 PM The entire problem with slow access from a "real HP-75 - PIL-Box - ILPilbox v1.1 - ILPer virtual disc drive" has been fixed in ILPilbox v1.3. The new version is available at http://hp.giesselink.com/hpil.htm and will increase the interface speed with PIL-Box as listener (with a HP-71B as controller) from ~50 bytes/s to ~375 bytes/s on my computers. With PIL-Box as controller (with Emu71/Win as controller) I got a transfer speed of ~265 bytes/s. For those who already downloaded the beta version of ILPilbox, replace the your file with the one from the package please, the new one has a minor modification. RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - hp41cx - 01-07-2014 10:15 PM (01-07-2014 07:14 PM)Christoph Giesselink Wrote: The entire problem with slow access from a "real HP-75 - PIL-Box - ILPilbox v1.1 - ILPer virtual disc drive" has been fixed in ILPilbox v1.3. Antivirus software detected a virus. Your downloaded file may have a virus, as a result the file you attempted to download was removed by the Windows Attachment Manager. RE: HP 75 and the PIL-Box - Raymond Del Tondo - 01-07-2014 11:02 PM (01-07-2014 10:15 PM)hp41cx Wrote: Antivirus software detected a virus. Your downloaded file may have a virus, as a result the file you attempted to download was removed by the Windows Attachment Manager.Which file or files are you referring to? I just downloaded all archives from the hpil page, and my virus scanner did not find a problem with the files. Did you check your WAM settings? |