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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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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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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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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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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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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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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