Update of ILPer to 2.25 and all other IL programs

[Christoph Giesselink]

ILPer 2.25 fix an issue in the disk drive implementation in connection with new LIF disk images.

An a real HP9114 device we can distinguish the operation with

1. no disk inserted
2. not formatted disk inserted
3. disk inserted with unknown disk format
4. disk inserted with LIF or DOS data

What we need in the disk drive simulation:

1. no disk inserted
2. create a new disk and format it
3. disk inserted with LIF or DOS data

How these three states are now simulated in v2.25?

1) no disk inserted

The LIF image filename edit box is empty or the content of the edit box contains a non valid filename (i.e. only path). In Windows a filename only consist of an extension like ".lif" is a valid filename!

2) create a new disk and format it

The LIF image filename edit box contains a valid filename, but the file itself don't exist. Read and Write is not possible, but you can initialize such a drive and than it's fully operable.

3) disk inserted with LIF or DOS data

Full access with no restrictions in the limits of the given sectors numbers.

Other fixes in ILPer

• use the PIL-Box receive format for sending data back to the PIL-Box
• fix window position restore when starting minimized
  

All other programs got also the "fix window position restore when starting minimized" change.

I also introduced the new program ILPilsim. ILPilsim is a PIL-Box Simulation to connect J-F Garniers DOS based emulators Emu41, Emu71/DOS and Emu75 to Virtual HP-IL. These DOS based emulators still have a COM port interface to connect a PIL-Box @ 9600 baud. On DOS environments like DOSBox or on Virtual machines (VM) like VirtualBox or VMware these COM ports can be redirected to a TCP/IP server or on Windows to named pipes. And so its possible to capture the forwarded serial traffic, decode the PIL-Box byte stream to IL frames and send the frames over the Virtual HP-IL interface to other external devices. For further information read the ILPilsim manual please.

Some years ago I just tried this in connection with DOSBox without success. I want to TNX Joachim, who made new attempt using a Virtual Machine. So I wrote the program to connect a guest DOS in a VM and it was working. Another try with DOSBox about three weeks ago failed with buffer overruns. A recent 2nd try after looking into the DOSBox source code about one week ago I found the parameters getting DOSBox working!

The programs are available at http://hp.giesselink.com/hpil.htm.