Update on HP95-lx prototype
Message #1 Posted by Edwin Herdman on 14 Oct 2002, 12:28 p.m.
I'll be getting a camera soon, so I'll be able to post a page with more complete information on this system.
I found a bug in the system within the first few minutes of use and had to take the batteries out; beyond that, there are virtually no deviations from the normal 95lx and in fact I've been able to use the standard manuals woodshop (the excellent eBay seller who I bought the unit from) sent along with the system to figure out some of the unit's features, seeing as how this is the only 95 I own.
Something else of interest is the business card feature. I saw a photo of the standard 95lx business card and I thought it looked rather clumsy with the faux-shadowing (and I think that of the excessive use of ASCII shadowing in DOS programs for the system's big PC brother as well). On my unit, I have 3 fields on a blank background, along with the other usual display elements.
There are two .PCX files burned onto the ROM that apparently are supposed to be useful for display purposes. One features oversized application icons along the left and bottom of the screen with text saying (I believe) "press an application key..." and looks pleasant overall. This file is named ICONS.PCX, don't have the exact date at the moment.
The other file is terrible, and looks like a programmer made it, perhaps after 72 hours of sleep. It features all the application icons along the left side, but they didn't scale properly and don't look quite round. Along the right side is a huge solid black block with the words "Lotus and HP present" --note that they used the company logos, and the "t" in Lotus apparently suffered from an attempt to make it prettier, with two clear pixels that nearly line up in the center. At the bottom of this solid block is "JAGUAR" in big, ugly letters. Somewhere around the center of the picture is a stray pixel hanging off a letter where it shouldn't. Altogether, it reads "Lotus and HP" return "present" return "JAGUAR"
This last picture is quite bad for reasons that you can test on a Texas Instruments TI-83 type of calculator: As it uses a LCD display, a solid column will cause pixels underneath to become darker. This effect is noticeable under the block I mentioned earlier.
Besides that, everything else seems mostly in order, just without all the useless text ornaments in the usual system. It runs MS-DOS 3.11 and has the standard amount of RAM. Selecting a file in the filer does not start the program but displays the program code, but isn't terribly useful since there are often undisplayable ASCII machine instructions. The clamshell is identical to the final one.
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