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Ever seen or used a 200LX?
I think it's one of the best & more practical palmtop ever produced.
The orginal model was a PC with a 80186 with 2MB RAM, CGA graphics, an 80x25 B/N supertwisted LCD (very readable), IR, Serial & PCMCIA port.
It even has Lotus 123 in ROM, along with a RPN Calculator (hey, it's HP!), terminal, phonebook, agenda, filemanager, etc.
All in 300gr. x 16x8x3cm, with a week or so of battery live (2 AA, alkaline o rechargable.)
And it come with DOS 5.0. So, no problem to develop software for it.
In facts, we have sold over a hundred of them to various customer with various software.
It was also a very strong & reliable machine.
We also used them all the time as a working tool: such a programmable "small beast" with a serial port, could be used for a number of tasks, like reprogramming cash registers, storing configurations profiles/info for various devices, testing modems, etc.
At that time, developing was made primary in Microsoft Basic 7.x. Even some low level library code in C & ASM, for example for controlling the serial port, worked without a problem.
All testing & debugging where done on a normal PC, and the exact same executable run on the 200LX (with the unique limitation being not be able to enable 286/386 code generation, obviously).
Theese days, I have tried to run some PB/DOS made programs, as now I'm more confortable with this BASIC.
But I have noted some strange things.
For example, when a PB EXE is run, the screen flash for an instant, and the execution is suspended until a key is pressed.
This is true even for a simple, do near nothing (like assing a var) program.
Instead, file I/O or screen display functions seems to works without problems.
I'll do some more indepth testing in the next days, I hope.
I whould like to ask Tom or other PB guys if they have any experience of PB EXE working on this kind of palmtop.
Thanks,
Bye!
P.S.
If you want to see some info about the 200LX, here are some URLs:
HP 100LX/200LX Technical Information
http://www.hplx.net/
Thaddeus Computing (they still sells used & like new 200LX!)
------------------
Try TrID file identifier! Over 1000 filetypes and counting...
Give a powerfull scriptable Lua interface to your application with PowerBLua
PBTracer - Tracer / Profiler for PowerBASIC (soon!)
[This message has been edited by Marco Pontello (edited March 30, 2004).]
I think it's one of the best & more practical palmtop ever produced.
The orginal model was a PC with a 80186 with 2MB RAM, CGA graphics, an 80x25 B/N supertwisted LCD (very readable), IR, Serial & PCMCIA port.
It even has Lotus 123 in ROM, along with a RPN Calculator (hey, it's HP!), terminal, phonebook, agenda, filemanager, etc.
All in 300gr. x 16x8x3cm, with a week or so of battery live (2 AA, alkaline o rechargable.)
And it come with DOS 5.0. So, no problem to develop software for it.
In facts, we have sold over a hundred of them to various customer with various software.
It was also a very strong & reliable machine.
We also used them all the time as a working tool: such a programmable "small beast" with a serial port, could be used for a number of tasks, like reprogramming cash registers, storing configurations profiles/info for various devices, testing modems, etc.
At that time, developing was made primary in Microsoft Basic 7.x. Even some low level library code in C & ASM, for example for controlling the serial port, worked without a problem.
All testing & debugging where done on a normal PC, and the exact same executable run on the 200LX (with the unique limitation being not be able to enable 286/386 code generation, obviously).
Theese days, I have tried to run some PB/DOS made programs, as now I'm more confortable with this BASIC.
But I have noted some strange things.
For example, when a PB EXE is run, the screen flash for an instant, and the execution is suspended until a key is pressed.
This is true even for a simple, do near nothing (like assing a var) program.
Instead, file I/O or screen display functions seems to works without problems.
I'll do some more indepth testing in the next days, I hope.
I whould like to ask Tom or other PB guys if they have any experience of PB EXE working on this kind of palmtop.
Thanks,
Bye!
P.S.
If you want to see some info about the 200LX, here are some URLs:
HP 100LX/200LX Technical Information
http://www.hplx.net/
Thaddeus Computing (they still sells used & like new 200LX!)
------------------
Try TrID file identifier! Over 1000 filetypes and counting...
Give a powerfull scriptable Lua interface to your application with PowerBLua
PBTracer - Tracer / Profiler for PowerBASIC (soon!)
[This message has been edited by Marco Pontello (edited March 30, 2004).]
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