PILBox with HPPortablePlus

[Martin Hepperle]

Ralf,

many of the programs are standard MS-DOS programs, which are not depending on the HP hardware. For example, the early Microsoft Pascal or Fortran versions, MS-DOS (not PC-DOS) Pascal up to 3.01 or the Lattice C compilers.
All these programs work because they use plain MS-DOS function calls and no calls into the ROM-BIOS. If they use cursor positioning (e.g. Turbo Pascal) they use escape sequences which are configurable by the user. Most of these programs have their roots in CP/M.

Some programs have been adapted for the screens and the BIOS of the HP-150, Portable or Portable Plus, for example GWBASIC/110/110+/150 or Wordstar/150.

The usual HP 110 files use early MS-DOS 2.1 formats. Not all of the current MS-DOS capable tools support all of the early MS-DOS formats.

So my procedure would be
1) prepare an empty, ILPER compatible disk image
2) extract individual files from the TD0->IMG converted image.
3) copy these individual files to the ILPER disk image
4) watch for file size in relation to EPROM size (64...128kB).

You have to take into account, that some/most of the TD0 small disk images contain "bogus" sectors #17 or 128 bytes (all proper sectors have 256 bytes). So when going from TD0 to IMG one has to skip/remove these sectors #17.

A good tool to look at the disk image is to open the *.TD0 file in HxCFloppyEmulator and look at the disk/sector map. Here you can clearly see the small and large sectors as well as the tracks used for data. HxCFloppyEmulator can also export the data to a raw, linear image file (still including the 128 byte sector #17).

If you are interested in specific TD0 disks, I can try to extract the individual files and post them here in from of a ZIP archive.

Martin