VDE for HP 110 Portable Plus

[Martin Hepperle]

Well, I know this is rather oldish stuff..

 

I have a (then) state of the art Hewlett Packard Portable Plus (aka 110+) and I am using VDE becaues it is so small from one of the "Portable paper" subscribers disks.

 

While the program works nicely (in conjunction with some INT-bending helpers - TSRs) I regularly run into a problem of running out of file handles. Also I cannot use the special characters on my keyboard.

 

After 4-5 starting-editing-compiling cycles the compiler "cannot find" his header files and this seems to be linked to losing file handles when VDE is started anmd ended. I gues that VDE opens some file handles and never closes them or relies on DOS to close them on exit.

 

Is there a chance to access the sources for the older versions of VDE?  For example I would like to adapt the screen and keyboard handling to the HP machines BIOS.to get rid of TSR programs.

 

I guess that today VDE is not of huge commercial interest and for long term preservation of software it woiuld be generally very helpful if the sources of the various versions would be available.

 

Martin

[Eric Meyer]

Martin,

Perhaps your TSRs are using handles? VDE explicitly closes any that it opens,
and DOS should close them even if it didn't. As far as I know older versions
always did too, whichever you may be using, but in any case they're no longer
supported. I haven't made source code available; you're welcome to enjoy the
program as it is, or was.

-- Eric Meyer.

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 8:48 AM, Martin Hepperle
<martin....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, I know this is rather oldish stuff..
>
> I have a (then) state of the art Hewlett Packard Portable Plus (aka 110+)
> and I am using VDE becaues it is so small from one of the "Portable paper"
> subscribers disks.
>
> While the program works nicely (in conjunction with some INT-bending helpers
> - TSRs) I regularly run into a problem of running out of file handles. Also

IIRC, the HP 110+ ran a flavor of DOS, but I don't recall which
version. In DOS, you can change the default file handle allocation
with a FILES=<num> in CONFIG.SYS. What's currently in the CONFIG.SYS
file?

And what TSRs are you running?

> I cannot use the special characters on my keyboard.

What special keys does it have? VDE doesn't use special keys on the
device. About all you might be able to do is run a TSR keyboard
mapper that will see the scan codes the keys send and convert them on
the fly to something VDE does see. How much good that would do would
depend upon what the keys are expected to do, and whether there is a
corresponding action in VDE a modified keypress would trigger.

> After 4-5 starting-editing-compiling cycles the compiler "cannot find" his
> header files and this seems to be linked to losing file handles when VDE is

> started anmd ended. I guess that VDE opens some file handles and never closes

> them or relies on DOS to close them on exit.

Which compiler and what language?

It sounds like you're using VDE to edit program code. What features
do you want in your editor? There are a large number of old DOS
editors of varying size still available. While I'm all in favor of
people still using VDE, it was intended to be a WordStar compatible
word processor, not a programmer's editor. There may be a better tool
available for the job.

See http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?MsDosEditors for a list of
the ones I know of. See
http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TinyEditors for a list of tiny
editors for various platforms. (The arbitrary cutoff was 64K
executable size.)

I was a happy user of Dr. David Nye's E editor back in the day: files
up to the size of memory, search and replace, block move/copy/delete,
and settable right *and* left margins, all in a 5K com file. It also
had a form of macro capability. You could assign batch files to E
F-keys. Press the key, E would copy the editing buffer to a temp
file, and then call the batch file in s subshell and pass it the temp
file name. You could write filters in batch files to do things E
couldn't do native. When the batch file finished, the modified temp
file was read back into E. The big gotcha was that E was limited to
80 char lines by the way text was stored in memory, and longer lines
were silently truncated. For program code that might be a show
stopper.

If you like the WordStar command set, the DOS version of Albrecht
Kliene's e3 editor is worth a look. It can emulate emacs, nedit,
pico, vi or WS. It uses a stub file and overlay. The stub file in DOS
is a whopping 4K, and provides WS key bindings.

> Is there a chance to access the sources for the older versions of VDE? For
> example I would like to adapt the screen and keyboard handling to the HP
> machines BIOS.to get rid of TSR programs.

> I guess that today VDE is not of huge commercial interest and for long term

> preservation of software it would be generally very helpful if the sources

> of the various versions would be available.

No. Eric hasn't released source and doesn't plan to. And IIRC, VDE
is written in assembler, and I don't believe the assembler Eric uses
is available these days.

> Martin
______
Dennis

[Martin Hepperle]

Thank you all for your replies.

I will try to find out whether one of the TSRs is responsible for my problem.

The reason for using these TSRs is that the HP machines BIOS and screen memory layout is not 100% IBM compatible and these TSRs infuse some adaptations e.g. into the keyboard and into the video interrupt. The Dos version is 2.1, not sure whether this already used handles or the FCB structures.

Concerning special keys: I use a German keyboard where the keys like {},[] or \ are only available via a prefix key. VDE does not read these key combinations so that I can only copy and paste these characters if I have them somewhere in the code. Not very practical for real work.

I will probably look for another editor where I can adapt the source code to better match the HP systems "quirks" err. I mean "unique features" w.r.t. keyboard and screen handling. Could be in assembler or C as long as it is possible to identify keyboard and screen handling routines.

As a programming language I use Turbo C command line tools as the Borland IDE is written to directly access the IBM hardware and does not run on the HP.

Thank you,

Martin

[Eric Meyer]

VDE reads key input at the interrupt level (int 16h), as most word processors
do. You may be able to find an old simple editor that uses plain BIOS input,
and would be compatible with your German keyboard... or as you say, one with
source code you could try to modify. But I expect key combinations like those
would be a challenge. Viel Glück!

-- Eric Meyer.


Martin Hepperle wrote:

> --
> ---Get VDE and related files at http://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "VDE_Editor" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
> an email to vde_editor+...@googlegroups.com
> <mailto:vde_editor+...@googlegroups.com>.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Moy Wong]

Hello,

In addition to using VDE, also use an ancient version of AE, which is
based on Tom Kihlken's TED editor published by PC magazine. AE's most
recent version has source code available:

http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AE_Asm

Hope this helps.

-moy


]Thank you all for your replies.

]
]--

]---Get VDE and related files at http://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/
]---
]You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VDE_Editor" group.

]To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to vde_editor+...@googlegroups.com.
]For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 5:54 AM, Martin Hepperle
<martin....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I will probably look for another editor where I can adapt the source code to
> better match the HP systems "quirks" err. I mean "unique features" w.r.t.
> keyboard and screen handling. Could be in assembler or C as long as it is
> possible to identify keyboard and screen handling routines.

And thinking about it, you might want to look at Yossi Gil's Terse.
Terse derived from PC Magazine's Ted editor, but has been extensively
reworked. It uses a Brief command set and has a number of features,
while still fitting in 4K. The distribution archive includes a
variant called H.COM for HP Palmtops that might be a good fit for your
device. (Like other such products, there is a 64K limit on the size
of file it can edit. See http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Terse
for info and download.) Source is not available.

Another possibility is Brian Kelly's TM, a tiny editor using Emacs
keybindings. It's another editor that fits in a 4K com file, and has
search and replace and unlimited undo. Source for the A86 assembler
is available. See http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TM

And yet another is Russell Nelson's FreeMACS, a DOS version of Emacs
on 23K. It uses the Emacs command set, and is programmable in a
script language called MINT. Addembler source is included. See
http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Freemacs
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519