Update of Virtual HP-IL devices

[Christoph Giesselink]

Updates of the Virtual HP-IL devices are available at http://hp.giesselink.com/hpil.htm.

Recently I had a discussion with JFG about the future of ILPer. We fully agreed that most users of virtual devices want to have an integrated solution with direct PIL-Box connection rather than the flexible way with ILPilbox and Virtual HP-IL. But we are in the glad situation that it's not a either ... or decision.

The must have for a new version of ILPer:

• Same window size like before as respect for the limited desktop size of older machines
• Direct access-able Scope (sorry, JFG and I are developers which want to know what's happen on the loop)
  

The above two points are a refusal to all these people which are hoping for a larger printer window.

But we personally wanted to have a 2nd Disk drive and the DOSLINK device. So ILPer v2.0 now contain the

1. Scope
2. Generic Printer
3. Disk Drive 1
4. Disk Drive 2
5. DOSLINK device
   

The Disk Drive 1 has the same ID$ and 80 tracks dimension like before, the 2nd Disk Drive is configured as a high capacity drive when initializing (formatting) a medium. Both disk devices can be configured to custom device ID$ and drive dimensions.

Because of these additional features the configuration place of many option moved from the [Settings] section in ILPer v1.x to another place. Special settings are not imported from the old version. If you're using the ini-file (vil-file) method to save your settings, I suggest to use a new or empty ILPer settings file. By this way you don't get confused by unused options from the old version ILPer v1.x.

Also new, the order of the internal device can be changed. But it's not possible to disable a device.

For all changes have a look at the ILPerAdd.htm file please.

I also provided new versions of:

• ILPilbox v1.6
• ILScope v1.5
• ILDoslink v1.01
• ILVideo v1.3
• ILVideo80 v1.2
  

ILPilbox v1.6 now can enable the better support for managing HP-IL Service Requests in the PIL-Box firmware 1.6. The scope inside ILPer and ILScope got the new feature to disable the IDY frame output for this case.

As JFG noticed, the PIL-Box firmware update to 1.6 is more or less for future virtual HP-IL devices. The only device which already make use of this feature is the Terminal inside pyILPER.

I strongly recommend to make the update to the IPv4/IPv6 dual stack ILProgsIPv6 program versions. Especially the combination of using the HP-IL Service Requests of the PIL-Box in connection with a mixture of virtual devices supporting IPv4 only and IPv4/IPv6 dual stack will fail with a broken loop on the IDY frames.

Christoph