Benton Harbor Basic Renumber
This disk contains a handy stand-alone utility that will
renumber Benton Harbor Basic programs. RENUM properly
ignores remark statements and quoted strings, and renumbers
CNTRL 0 statements. A strategy is included for handling the
LNO() function.
A major benefit of RENUM is its ability to renumber a
program written with no line numbers except those that are
necessary targets of jumps, and those numbers do not need to
be in order. This allows the easy construction of BH Basic
programs using a text editor, allowing code to be inserted
or moved at will.
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DBUG Console mode fix
I remember this problem as being very irritating 20 years
ago but very easy to find and fix, since I had the source
listings. 20 years later, it's still irritating. But much
harder to find and fix.
dbug changes the console mode to character mode, no echo.
Its command structure depends on these settings. dbug is
supposed to restore the target program's console mode on a
Go or Step command, save it on return to dbug, and restore
its own while you are in command mode. But a misplaced RET
instruction causes it to try to run with the user's console
mode after returning from a Step.
Simple work-around: type "40326=201 " and press return after
every step (note the space after the "201"). Ugh.
Better fix: slide a short routine up one byte in memory and
put that RET where it belongs. Then fix the address of one
call to the moved routine. That's what was done to the
version of dbug.abs that's on this disk. There's a text file
on the disk that describes the process in more detail, and
includes the tests to run to verify that things are working
as they are supposed to be after the surgery.
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Disk Dumper
If you have a working H8 or H89, here's a utility you can
use to export your H-17 disks to portable format for use
with the emulator. The exported disks will work with Dave
Wallace's Virtual H8 as well. This is assembler source code
that will need to be moved to your H8/H89 and assembled.
Disk Dumper will dump any of the standard H-17 disk formats:
- 100K disks formatted under HDOS 1.6;
-
40 track, 1 sided disks used with the standard HDOS SY:
driver;
-
40- and 80-track, single and double-sided disks used with
the HUG replacement SY: driver.
Version 2.0 skips sectors marked to be skipped in RGT.SYS,
substituting zeros for the skipped sectors. It correctly
handles most I/O errors, supplying sector fill based on the
type of the file. (The files RGT.SYS, GRT.SYS, the label,
and the active part of the directory must be error free or
the dump will fail.) And it supplies useful disk
documentation in the converted disk image.
Version 2.1 adds a check byte comment following each dumped
sector. This check byte is compared with the check byte
calculated by the emulator v5.3.0 or higher and a message is
displayed if the check bytes don't match. This gives the
user some assurance that the dumped disk image was
transferred correctly to the emulator.
You will need to interface another computer (Mac or PC) to
an H8/H89 serial port in order to capture the dumped disk
image. Instructions are provided.
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HDOS 2.0 Utilities
Useful HDOS 2.0 Utilities. This includes two versions of a
helpful prologue.sys application and a disk statistics
display program that mimics the 'stat' command from HDOS
1.6.
There is also a very useful utility that displays a disk
file in octal and ASCII dump format and allows you to scroll
and browse. If the file happens to be in .ABS format, the
displacements shown match the runtime load addresses, making
it very easy to follow program logic. This had a bug, kindly
found and fixed by
Stanley Webb, that treated DEL as a printable character.
Finally, there's a little tool that lets you change the
PAM/8 display from the command line.
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HDOS Patch Files (for both HDOS 2.0 and HDOS 1.6)
Here is a collection of patch files that were originally
published by HUG, provided to me by
Stanley Webb. They fix problems and add features to the various utility
and applications programs that are a part of HDOS. One, for
example, provides the official HUG patch to the debugger to
correct the console mode problem (see Console Mode Fix
below).
Stanley also included a patch that he developed for HDOS 2.0
that removes the offset-70 date bias, allowing years from 00
through 99 to be entered and displayed.
These are supplied as text files on an H-17 portable disk
image. The 24-Jul-2002 update corrects a type-o in one of
the HDOS 2.0 patch files, and includes the patched version
of several of the .abs files for your convenience. The HDOS
1.6 disk image was not updated.
As always, patch a copy and test carefully.
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HUG Enhanced SY: Device Driver
I am distributing this driver with the written permission of
the author,
Dean K. Gibson. Please note Dean's copyright notices in the source code
and documentation.
This driver is necessary if you want to increase the
capacity of your emulated disk drives by supporting
double-sided and 80-track drives. There are significant
performance improvements as well. And the driver will boot
and operates perfectly when the clock speed is set faster
than 2 mhz.
But beware: Installation is a non-trivial, multi-step
process. Make sure you read all the supplied documentation
carefully and think out the implications of the drive
configuration you settle on. And work with temporary disks
until you have tested the configuration.
The package includes a Disk Configuration utility that I
wrote that displays the configuration of the drives and the
characteristics of mounted media, when used with the HUG SY:
driver:
>dc
H17 Drive Configuration v1.2
HUG Enhanced SY: Driver is installed
----Drive---- --------Disk-------- ------Free------
Tracks Sides Tracks Sides SPG Clusters Sectors
SY0: 40 2 40 2 4 98 392
SY1: 40 2 40 1 2 113 226
SY2: 80 2 40 2 4 13 52 *
* Compatibility Mode - disk can be read, not written.
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PIE 1.5b Text Editor
I am distributing this version of PIE with written
permission from the original author,
Thomas Crosley, and
Walt Bilofsky
of
The Software Toolworks, who adapted the program to HDOS.
PIE8 works perfectly with the emulator, and is stupendously
better than (shudder) edit.abs, which came with HDOS. I
highly recommend that you download this disk!
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