HP-71B directory of 9114B disk

[Martin Hepperle]

(03-31-2018 10:59 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  [...]
The Series-80 CP/M file system essentially exists inside a single LIF file, and there is no cooked-in way to import/export files. After much discussion (perhaps 1-1.5 years ago on the Series-80 newsgroup) IIRC, the consensus was that the easiest method is to use serial ports to send the subject file to another machine, and then possibly back to Series-80, depending on if the target machine can natively write/read LIF media. This is one of the key reasons Series-80 CP/M pretty much failed from the beginning.

After the discussion noted above, I never heard any further solutions, so no idea if anyone perfected any file exchange process, I know I was discouraged and stopped looking.

So while I am happy to have a CP/M co-processor card for my HP-87XM, odds of actually using it are slim.
[...]

Some time ago I was exploring the guts of the CP/M system for the HP 86/87.

Actually it is quite simple to copy files to a disk for the Series-80 CP/M subsystem.
As the whole disk is in LIF format you can use the original CP/M boot disk for the HP 86/87 as a template and simply replace files in the the single file which represents the CP/M disk image on that LIF disk.
This means all CP/M files have to be copied to this file on the disk, which is at a given offset in the LIF image.
One tool which works fine for this purpose is "cpmtools". This set of programs works with many different CP/M disk image formats and can be configured for the HP-86/87 disks. It transparently handles the CP/M directory "structure" so that you can list, copy and, remove files.

http://www.moria.de/~michael/cpmtools/

I have appended the following definitions to the file "diskdefs" to be able to read and write CP/M disk images. The format names are composed of "HP80" followed by a number indicating the disk size (35, 525, 8)
The parameter boottrk defines at which track the CP/M image file starts, i.e. where its boot record is located. The given values are valid if you start with a copy of HPs CP/M boot disk.

Then one can use commands like

Code:


cpmls -f HP80525 cpm_3_mp.hpi

to list the contents of the CP/M file system on a HP-LIF formatted 5.25" disk image.
I used "cpmcp" to copy e.g. ZORK, Turbo Pascal or MULTIPLAN to the disk images.

Code:


# Hewlett-Packard HP86/87 – DSDD 48 tpi 3.5" - 256x16
diskdef HP8035
  seclen 256
  tracks 75
  sectrk 16
  blocksize 1024
  maxdir 128
  skew 0
  boottrk 3
  os 2.2
end

# Hewlett-Packard HP86/87 – DSDD 48 tpi 5.25" - 256x16
diskdef HP80525
  seclen 256
  tracks 35
  sectrk 16
  blocksize 1024
  maxdir 128
  skew 0
  boottrk 3
  os 2.2
end

# Hewlett-Packard HP86/87 – DSDD 48 tpi 8" - 256x30
diskdef HP808
  seclen 256
  tracks 75
  sectrk 30
  blocksize 1024
  maxdir 128
  skew 0
  boottrk 2
  os 2.2
end

As has already been mentioned, more info can be found on the groups.io web site (https://groups.io/g/hpseries80).

Martin