New find; HP HyperViper

From: Joe R. <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Sat Apr 24 21:53:30 2004

Hello Bernd,

   I'm still experimenting with the Viper system. The HyperViper is a real
pleasure to use! Today I hooked up a couple of different external HP-IB
hard drives and tested them. Two of them were untested and it turned out
that both were bad :-( The third one is an old reliable standby HP7958B
with HPL, three different configurations of HP BASIC 4, BASIC 5 and BASIC 6
installed on it. At first I couldn't see the drive when the HV started
looking for operating systems but I was able to CATalog the drive after it
booted the Rocky Mountain BASIC from the PC's hard drive. It took me a
while to figure out why I couldn't see the external drive when the HV
booted. I finally realized that it was booting so fast that I never saw the
list of OSs on the external drive! The funny thing is that it showed the OS
of the PC drive for several seconds before it booted but it booted
IMMEDIATELY after showing the OSs on the HP-IB drive. I found that I had to
press the space bar on the keyboard as soon as the Boot ROM kicked in and
started showing system devices. Pressing the space bar stops it from
booting after it shows the OSs. At that point you can boot any OS that you
choose (same as any HP 9000 200/300). Anyway I was able to do a SYSTEM
STORE of the RMB to the HP-IB drive and then boot it from that drive. It
appears to work exactly the same as the copy loaded from the PC's hard
drive. I could also boot BASIC 4 and BASIC 5 but the display was shrunken
vertically on all of them. One configuration of BASIC 4 worked ok but the
others of BASIC 4 and BASIC 5 all filled the blank areas of the screen with
various characters when you did a CAT. However they all did seem to run.
BASIC 6 was the real surprise. It definetly didn't like it! As soon as it
started to load, the machine would jump back to DOS. Under normal
conditions you CAN jump back to DOS but you should be able to go right back
to RMB and your OS and application will still be running as if nothing
happened. But in this case, you couldn't go back to RMB until you powered
down the system and powered it up again and rerun the device driver and
loader. The loader said that RMB was still running but you never could
access it again. HPL was just as bad, when I tried to load it the screen
cleared and the machine appeared to lock up. I couldn't switch back to DOS
and Control-Alt-Delete didn't have any effect. IIRC HPL has a similar
effect on the HP 9000 300s. HPL is only supposed to run on the 9826 and
9836. I think it will work on a 9816 but I don't think it will even run on
the other 9000 200s such as the 217 and 237.

   I haven't tried Pascal yet. I have it on a drive but it's on another
system and it will be a pain to get to. But I'll probably dig it out
tomorrow and try it.

   I found a long list of optional parameters in the loader program (BASIC)
including things like SELFTEST, MENU, SHORT, LONG and others but none of
them appears to do anything. Anybody know anything about them?

   Joe


At 06:10 PM 4/22/04 +0200, you wrote:
>Hi Joe,
>does it run a version of HP Pascal too ?

   I'm not sure but I believe it will. I think I remember reading that it
will boot an OS from an external HP-IB drive just like a regular 9000/200
will. I need to dig out a drive and try it.

    Joe


>
>Thanks Bernd
>
>On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:24:23 -0400, Joe R. wrote:
>
>> Today I finally had a chance to check out a PC that I found a few weeks
>>ago. I had picked it up becuase it had an HP-IB connector on one of the
>>expansion cards. When I looked closer I saw that the card had a sticker
>>marked "HP 82324". Bingo! That's the part number of the souped-up
>>Measurement Coprocessor card that's commonly called a HyperViper! I have a
>>number of Viper cards with 68000 CPUs but I'd never even seen a HyperViper
>>card. The HyperViper uses a 16MHz 68030 CPU. The Vipers and HyperVipers are
>>HP 9000 series 200 or series 300 computers on a board. You install them in
>>a PC and run a driver and it switches over to the 680xx CPU and runs
>>(almost!) exactly like HP 9000 computer. It has a built-in HP-IB port and
>>supports additional HP-IB cards. It also mounts a HP 9000 file system in
>>one file on the PCs hard drive. It uses the PC's parallel and serial ports
>>and uses the PC's keybaord and monitor for user I/O. Anyway today I opened
>>it up and cleaned all the dirt and insects out and fired it up. It booted
>>to DOS then loaded the HP software then switched over to the HyperViper
>>card and booted HP BASIC version 6.2 (Rocky Mountain BASIC) without a
>>hitch. Wahoo! I'm in business now! It even has the last version (D.00.00)
>>of the HP divers.
>>
>> HP's Viper and HyperViper site >>
>><http://ftp.agilent.com/pub/mpusup/pc/old/vp_over.html#m5>
>>
>> Joe
>
>
>
>
Received on Sat Apr 24 2004 - 21:53:30 BST

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