The HPDrive Project
Why and how
If you got a working HP 9845 system you probably want use some mass storage as well. Since today most of the built-in tape drive systems fail (and because using those tape drives as storage - even if they do work - is not recommended anyway), another type of mass storage peripheral is needed.
If you own one, a floppy disk drive like the 9895A is certainly a good choice, of course in combination with the appropriate 98034A/B HP-IB interface. If you can't find a 9895A drive or any other mass storage in working condition, emulating a real vintage drive on a conventional PC is an attractive alternative. Since the 98034A interface is the only peripheral interface which is directly supported by the 9845 operating system (besides the 98041A disc interface), it is probably a good idea to build this emulator for use with an HP-IB connection. At the PC side, only a suitable IEEE488/GPIB interface card is needed, plus the emulator program itself.
HPDrive Setup
Beyond replacing a vintage HP-IB mass storage drive, an emulator has some additional advantages:
- Since the data is actually stored at the PC side, it is easy to use this way to exchange data with the PC, just through transferring the data to and from the emulated drive storage.
- The emulator can use binary image files as replacement of real mass storage media, so direct archiving is simplified.
- The emulator can be configured to simulate different types of drives, firmware revisions and media.
- The emulator can work with much higher speed than the original drives.
Sure, an emulator will never really replace the feeling with a real vintage drive, reading real vintage floppies, making all that noise, and drawing lots of power. But it can be quite useful, especially if you don't own other mass storage in working condition.
So I decided to do all that work, scanning all the HP-IB commands which go forth and back between a 9845 host and the peripheral, checking out the manuals which describe higher level HP-IB based command sets like the AMIGO command set, finding out how to low level program those GPIB boards under modern operating systems and whatever was needed to get this task done.
The result was a mass storage emulator program: the HPDrive utility. HPDrive runs as a console application under Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP and Vista. It is, in a first version, limited to the AMIGO command set, which was one of the early semi-device-independent peripheral command sets over an underlaying HP-IB connection. This protocol was quite popular at the time of the 9845s, and even the systems which followed the 9845s like the series 80 or series 200 systems mostly supported AMIGO based drives like the 9895A, the 82901 or the 9121. I started testing with the CS80/SS80 command set, which was a successor of the AMGIO command set, but since I don't own a real 79xx drive, it is hard to guess how certain drive side routines (so-called "utilities") are implemented, so this feature is still preliminary.
HPDrive is not restricted to an HP 9845. It now is supporting many combinations of host systems and HP-IB drive emulations. However, since my personal focus is mostly on the HP 9845 series in combination with the emulation of the standard drives which are supported by this system, in general this is what is most thoroughly tested. But Series 80, 200 and (with some restrictions) even 300 seem to work pretty well, too. Anyway, it is not impossible that other systems run into problems with the current version. If that happens, please just report the type of system you are using and make a protocol of the command sequences which caused the error (see at the end of this page how that can be done).
Note that booting an HP 9000 Series 200 system from HPDrive may or may not work. Reason behind is the strange HP-IB implementation in the Series 200 boot ROM which requires special bus timing which can't be guaranteed by HPDrive for all supported boards and on all types of PCs. Best for booting a Series 200 system from HPDrive currently is with an NI PCI-GPIB board.
Also see another program, the HPDir utilitiy for accessing images plus real floppies and real vintage disc and tape drives from a PC in the HPDir Project section.
Background: The AMIGO Command Set
In 1978 HP released a new multi-user computing system called HP 300. Although technically ahead of time, it wasn't much successful. One of the design principles of the HP 300 was to utilize the HP-IB for peripheral communication. In order to standardize the operation of mass storage equipment, a special command set was defined, which could be used to initiate and control operations like formatting and initializing media, reading and writing data, doing status reporting, performing diagnostics and some others. The name of the HP 300 operating system was AMIGO, so the command set was named AMIGO command set.
The basic principle of the AMIGO command set was to implement high level commands by sending HP-IB commands and by sending and receiving data. In general, each AMIGO command consists of four steps:
- First the peripheral device is addressed as either listener or talker (depending if it was intended to write data to or to read data from a device).
- Next a secondary command is issued, indicating the command group (e.g. read data) the command belongs to. If there are more than one command in the command group, the specific command is identified by an extra byte, the operation code.
- If appropriate, a number of parameters can be issued or data from the peripheral device can be received.
- Finally the command sequence is completed by the HP-IB untalk or unlisten command.
Some operations need two commands for one complete operation, for example the device status is first requested with one command and then the data is acquired with a second command.
The AMIGO command set is closely bound to the HP-IB protocol. Some techniques used by the AMIGO directly utilize features of the HP-IB. So device identification is done by the so-called AMIGO identify, which is just an HP-IB untalk, followed by a secondary which carries the address of the target device, which then should send its two-byte identification code as reply. This AMIGO identify still causes a lot of problems, since on one side its non-standard use of the IEEE-488 bus irritates some of the IEEE-488 PC cards, and on the other side it prevents the 9845 from operating with peripheral devices which - although they understand the AMIGO command set - are rejected just because the 9845 strictly works only with specific known device IDs. Even worse, because of the non-standard nature of this command, the AMIGO identify is extremly hard to implement since it requires register level access. The current NEC µPD7210 implementation is based on using the HP-IB UNTALK command (31) as secondary board address, which is not possible on other GPIB controller chips like the TMS9914 or high-level APIs like NI 488.2.
Another example for an implementation very close to the HP-IB is the way the peripheral device holds off the host from sending commands too quickly (i.e. sending a command before the processing of the preceding command has not yet been finished). This hold-off mechanism is based on the HP-IB parallel poll feature. As long as a peripheral device is busy, it just deactivates its response to a parallel poll. So when sending a command to a peripheral device, the host should send parallel poll requests in short intervals until the poll is successful, just to be sure that the next command can be accepted. This mechanism is the reason why only primary addresses between 0 and 7 should be used for mass storage devices, since the parallel poll answering line is directly coupled with the address (address 0 uses line 7, address 1 uses line 6 etc.). It is obvious that such a polling mechanism is not as efficient as a request-reply scheme, but it works.
The AMIGO command set was implemented in the HP 9845 as well as in a couple of mass storage devices. As stated above, some of those devices are not supported by the HP 9845 just because the HP 9845 rejects their identification code. Here are the devices which implement the AMIGO command set, and whether they are supported by the HP 9845 or not (note that there are combo and non-combo variants for most base types):
| Name | Type | Supported | Base | ID | Units | |
| 9895A | 8" Floppy Disc | HP1,SSS | 9895A | $0081 | 2 | |
| 82901M | 5.25" Floppy Disc | SSS | 82901 | $0104 | 2 | |
| 82902M | 5.25" Floppy Disc | SSS | 82901 | $0104 | 1 | |
| 9121D | 3.5" Floppy Disc 2) | SSS | 9121 | $0104 | 2 | |
| 9121S | 3.5" Floppy Disc 2) | SSS | 9121 | $0104 | 1 | |
| 9133A | Hard Disc & 3.5" Floppy Disc Combo 1) | SSS | 9134A | $0106 | 1+1 | |
| 9134A | Hard Disc 1) | SSS | 9134A | $0106 | 1 | |
| 9135A | Hard Disc & 5.25" Floppy Disc Combo 1) | SSS | 9134A | $0106 | 1+1 | |
| 9133V | Hard Disc & 3.5" Floppy Disc Combo 1) 3) | SSS | 9134A | $0106 | 1+1 | |
| 9133B | Hard Disk & 3.5" Floppy Disc Combo | SSS | 9134B | $010A | 1+1 | |
| 9134B | Hard Disc | SSS | 9134B | $010A | 1 | |
| 9133XV | Hard Disc & 3.5" Floppy Disc Combo 3) | SSS | 9134XV | $010F | 1+1 | |
| 9134XV | Hard Disc 3) | SSS | 9134XV | $010F | 1 | |
| 7910 | Hard Disc | HP2 | 7910 | $0001 | 1 |
Notes:
- Supported: 'HP1' denotes HP Mass Storage ROM Rev. B or later, 'HP2' denotes HP Mass Storage ROM Rev. C or later, 'SSS' denotes third party Mass Storage ROM from Structured Software Systems.
- All combo drives use an 92801 emulation for their floppy disc drive, except the XV types, which emulate a 9121 with extended AMIGO command set.
Footnotes:
1) may be configured as 4-unit logical 9895A drive with 1.15 MB for each unit
2) physical media format is 3.5" SS/DD with 70 cylinders, identifies as 8290xM
3) floppy drive in combo emulates 3.5" (9121S) floppy disk drive (extended command set)
The AMIGO command set was later replaced by the CS/80 command set (CS is just an acronym for 'command set'). Main features of this new command set were a new device independend channel model, as well as support for tape storage and for device dependend subroutines. A special subset with a restricted number of commands and parameters was defined in order to simplify implementation especially for smaller mass storage devices. This subset was consequently named SS/80. The SS/80 protocol was used by smaller drives including the 9133D/H/L, the 9134D/H/L, the 9122D/S, the 9153A and the 9154A. The 9845 has some basic support for CS/80 drives, namely the 7908, 7911 and 7912 drives, which are supported by the Mass Storage ROM Rev. C and later. The largest drive storage supported by the 9845 is a CS/80 drive, too: the 7933/7935, which provides up to 3x404 Mbyte = 1.2 GByte (!) storage to the 9845.
Specifications of the AMIGO command set can be found as part of several peripheral device manuals (e.g., the 9895A service manual, see hpmuseum.net for download). Note that not all AMIGO features are implemented by all peripheral devices. Specification of the CS/80 command set can be found in the CS/80 Instruction Set Programming Manual which is available for download here. A specification for the SS/80 command set can be downloaded here.
Background: Implementation Challenges
Emulating an AMIGO or CS80 mass storage device is not an easy task for several reasons.
The most severe problem lies in the implementation of the AMIGO identify command, which is used both with the original AMIGO and the CS80/SS80 command set. As already mentioned above, this command consists of an HP-IB UNTALK with a following secondary command holding the primary address of the drive, which is completely non-standard with respect to IEEE488. The reason why HP designers did chose this way of identification is not completely clear. As a matter of fact, it prevents many non-HP mass storage solutions to work together with HP computer systems. If a device doesn't respond to an AMIGO identify with the appropriate reply, HP's HP-IB system software will refuse further communication with the device. And it makes it impossible to use high-level interfaces for PC GPIB controller boards, since those high-level APIs generally implement the IEEE488 standard only. Also non-standard is the behavior of the AMIGO drives to abort their operations when being untalked or unlistened during an operation. Finally, the HP hosts, when talking to AMIGO drives, tend to assert the ATN line before the transfer has been completed, which gets lots of standard implementations into trouble.
The current NEC µPD7210 implementation therefore operates on register level and uses a special, NEC µPD7210 specific hack to get the AMIGO identify command working. However, since there is no way to implement the AMIGO identify on the other classic, the TI TMS9914, this chip probably will never be supported for HPDrive (although it works well with HPDir). Same applies to to NI488.2 standard API.
But the most complex task was to bring the HPDrive emulator on a PCI board. I chose National Instruments PCI-GPIB since it is some kind of industry standard for PCI based GPIB boards. But I could not avoid the need to implement a completely new driver for this PCI board (so-called "custom TNT4882 driver"), which gives access to all those GPIB device functionality which is implemented into the TNT4882C and the TNT5004 chips, but hidden behind the NI488.2 API.
Another difficult aspect is emulating the correct HP-IB hold-offs and timing. If the emulator doesn't behave exactly like the original device, communication with HP computer systems will result in a sequence of communication errors. What makes proper timing even harder to implement, is that the emulator should run on platforms with different performance classes. And the problem even gets worse with badly implemented host GPIB drivers as often found in boot loaders, which use tight timeouts instead of proper protocol handshaking. However the timing resolution available under Windows within User Level is one millisecond, which is far too long for controlling proper HP-IB timing. And writing real GPIB drivers for several GPIB boards under Windows is beyond this project.
With respect to the problems mentioned above, the current implementations for the NEC µPD7210 and TNT4882C/TNT5004 seem quite stable.
The HPDrive Mass Storage Emulator
HPDrive implements all AMIGO commands which are used by the HP Mass Storage ROM, and can be configured to emulate at least the following AMIGO drives:
| Drive | 82901 | 9121 | 9895 | 9134A | 9134B | 9134XV | 7910 |
| ID | $0104 | $0104 | $0081 | $0106 | $010A | $010F | $0001 |
| Image Size (Bytes) | 286,720 | 286,720 | 1,182,720 | 4,856,832 | 9,713,664 | 14,570,496 | 12,042,240 |
| Phys. Cylinders | 35 | 35 | 77 | 306 | 306 | 306 | 735 |
| Phys. Heads | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 2 |
| Phys. Sectors/Track | 16 | 16 | 30 | 31 | 31 | 31 | 32 |
| Phys. Records | 1,120 | 1,120 | 4,620 | 18,972 | 37,944 | 56,916 | 47,040 |
Note: All drive parameters are shown as reported through the HP-IB interface, the actual physical media characteristics may differ (e.g. for the HP-IB interface, the 9121 emulates a 35-cylinder 2-head 82901 drive, but actually is a 70-cylinder single-head floppy disc drive).
In emulation of one of the above drives, HPDrive uses a so-called binary image file for storing the disc data. The format of those files is pretty generic, they just represent the records on the disc in ascending order (records are logic units comparable to the LBAs on modern disc drives and correspond to the physical sectors of a disc). Since in general most of the simulated disc space is empty, you can achieve high compression rates when archiving those images in ZIP files.
The size of the image files varies with the type of drive emulated. Due to the generic nature of the image format, it is in most cases possible to launch HPDrive with an image which was produced for another drive type (HPDrive will complain about a wrong image size, but will not refuse operation). The recommended way, however, is to use another utilitiy, the HPDir program in combination with the -convert action, to convert an image from one drive type into another. The images provided on this site in general have the right size for drive type 9895A. This also is the default for HPDrive, since the 9895A provides enough space for most applications and probably is supported by most vintage HP host systems and can therefore be considered as the most 'compatible' drive.
If you wonder why combo drives like the 9133 are not included in the above table, you simply have to consider combo drives as combination of two different drives from the table above. For example, the 9133 is a combination of a 9134 hard disc plus 9121 floppy. So for emulating the hard disc part of a 9133, simply use the 9134 emulation.
In addition to the AMIGO drives above, experimental support has been added for the following CS80/SS80 drives (currently only works with Series 200, not with 9845):
| Drive | 7908 | 7911 | 7912 |
| ID | $0200 | $0204 | $0208 |
| Image Size (Bytes) | 16,576,000 | 28,606,464 | 66,748,416 |
| Phys. Cylinders | 370 (plus spares) | 582 | 582 |
| Phys. Heads | 5 | 3 | 7 |
| Phys. Sectors/Track | 35 | 64 | 64 |
| Phys. Records | 64,750 | 111,744 | 260,736 |
Here are the 9845 file system characteristics for each drive:
| Drive | 82901 | 9121 | 9895 | 9134A | 9134B | 9134XV | 7910 |
| Interleave Factor | 7 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 1 |
| Sectors per Track | 16 | 16 | 30 | 31 | 31 | 31 | 32 |
| Accessable Tracks | 66 | 66 | 150 | 608 | 1,220 | 1,830 | 1,470 |
| Accessable Records | 1,056 | 1,056 | 4,500 | 18,848 | 37,820 | 56,730 | 47,040 |
| System Start | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Directory Start | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Directory Size | 8 | 8 | 22 | 92 | 123 | 123 | 143 |
| Alloc Table Start | 9 | 9 | 23 | 93 | 124 | 124 | 144 |
| Alloc Table Size | 7 | 7 | 7 | 62 | 62 | 62 | 48 |
| Spare Dir Start | 17 | 17 | 31 | 156 | 187 | 187 | 193 |
| Spare Alloc Start | 25 | 25 | 53 | 248 | 310 | 310 | 336 |
| File Area Start | 32 | 32 | 60 | 310 | 372 | 372 | 384 |
| System Tracks | 2 | 2 | 2 | 10 | 12 | 12 | 12 |
| Data Tracks | 64 | 64 | 148 | 598 | 1,208 | 1,818 | 1,458 |
| Data Records | 1,024 | 1,024 | 4,440 | 18,538 | 37,448 | 56,358 | 46,656 |
| Max. Total Storage | 270,336 | 270,336 | 1,152,000 | 4,825,088 | 9,681,920 | 14,522,880 | 12,042,240 |
| Max. Data Storage | 262,144 | 262,144 | 1,136,640 | 4,745,728 | 9,586,688 | 14,427,648 | 11,943,936 |
| Max. Dir Entries | 128 | 128 | 352 | 1,488 | 1,968 | 1,968 | 2,288 |
| Spare Tracks | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 6 | 0 |
Note: all size and position information is denoted with reference to 256-byte-records, except the max. total and data storage, which refers to bytes.
As we can see, the mass storage support of the HP 9845 with HPDrive goes up to the scale of at least 15 MBytes (and to more than 60 MBytes with the experimental CS80/SS80 drives). Actually, the limitation of file names to six characters in combination with the absence of subdirectories makes it hard to use larger storages with an HP 9845 anyway. Even the LIF filesystem format with its 10 character wide filenames lacks subdirectories. I guess SDF (the structured directory format) was the first HP file system which had been designed for larger mass storage systems. However HPDrive doesn't care about file systems, it just simulates the drive hardware and firmware.
System Requirements
On the vintage host side, you of course need a working HP-IB interface (some systems like the HP 86B or the HP 9836 already have basic built-in HP-IB interfaces, others need an HP-IB interface as add-on, like the HP 9845 which needs a revised 98034A or 98034B HP-IB interface).
HPDrive should work under all 32-bit Windows versions (9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista).
HPDrive currently supports NEC µPD7210 compatible IEEE488/GPIB interface cards as well as NI PCI-GPIB boards. This probably covers a large amount of existing cards, and at the same time keeps the choice open between a budget solution (almost all µPD7210-boards are ISA boards), and a high-performance 'professional' solution which works in modern PCs.
For IEEE488/GPIB boards currently supported see the following table:
| API's and Chipsets | Boards successfully tested with HPDrive | Boards which should work with HPDrive but have not yet been tested | Boards which are known not to work with HPDrive |
| NI 488.2 API | HPDrive doesn't work with this API | ||
| Custom TNT4882 Driver | NI PCI-GPIB (large board with TNT4882C) | NI PCI-GPIB (small board with TNT5004) | |
| NEC µPD7210 | NI GPIB-PCIIA (Assy No. 180100) | All older PCII/PCIIA compatible boards (NI Assy No. 180xx) | |
| TI TMS9914 | All boards with this chip | ||
| NAT4882 | NI AT-GPIB, all newer PCII/IIA compatible boards (NI Assy No. 181xx) | ||
| NI TNT4882C | NI AT-GPIB/TNT (Assy No. 182xx) |
Note that due to different capabilities of those boards, hardware which don't work with HPDrive may work with HPDir and vice versa (see the HPDir section for details). Also note that HPDrive in particular doesn't support the NI 488.2 API and the NI 488.2 driver cannot coexist with the custom TNT4882 driver on the same machine.
If you make your own experience with IEEE488/GPIB boards and HPDrive, please send me your reports with the contact feature, and I'll include your results in the above list.
HPDrive directly accesses the hardware registers, so be careful in using multiple instances of HPDrive on the same GPIB hardware or in using other drivers in parallel.
Driver Installation
HPDrive needs additional drivers installed in the following cases:- If you are running HPDrive under Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista, AND you are using an ISA GPIB board (such as a NI GPIBII/IIA) with HPDrive, please install the DlPortIO driver package before use.
- If you are using HPDrive in combination with a TNT4882C or TNT5004 based PCI-GPIB board, please make sure the custom TNT4882 driver is installed.
In all other cases, HPDrive will run without any additional drivers.
Installing the Custom TNT4882 driver
The custom TNT4882 driver is part of the HPDrive distribution. See the README in the custom TNT4882 driver package for detailed installation instructions.
Installing DLPortIO
The DlPortIO driver package (needed for ISA based GPIB boards under Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista) can be downloaded from http://www.driverlinx.com/DownLoad/DlPortIO.htm. Just execute the installer port95nt.exe and follow the instructions.
Getting Started
Usage of HPDrive is extremely simple, just execute
hpdrive -scan
within a console window from the directory where hpdrive.exe resides to make sure your IEEE488/GPIB interface board is supported by HPDrive. If no supported hardware is found and you are sure your interface board has at least a µPD7210 compatibility mode, consult your board's documentation how to configure it into the 7210 mode or how to chose the right I/O base address.
If using an ISA board, please please set the boards I/O base address as follows:
| Board Type | I/O base address |
| NI PCIIA and compatibles (NEC µPD7210 or NAT4882) | 02E1 (default) |
| NI PCII and compatibles (NEC µPD7210 or NAT4882) | 02B8 (default) |
| NI AT-GPIB and compatibles (NAT4882) | 02C0 (default) |
| NI AT-GPIB/TNT and compatibles (TNT4882) | 02C0 (default) |
If required, use the -port option for setting the I/O base address manually.
Example:
hpdrive -scan -port 0x3e0
tests for compatible boards on base address 03E0.
Interrupt and DMA setting are of no relevance for the HPDrive program, however you should make sure both interrupt and DMA settings do not conflict with other hardware installed in your system.
Some boards like the NI PCII/PCIIA need to be configured into 7210 mode manually before use. For example, some PCII/PCIIA boards support both 7210 and 9914 mode, to configure those boards into 7210 mode, set switch #8 on the DIP-switch to the ON-position (=position 1). For other boards, consult the documentation delivered with those boards.
If your board offers the choice for operating as device or system controller, chose 'device' for using HPDrive (ability for acting as device is prerequisite for using HPDrive).
Sample Start of the HPDrive Emulator
If HPDrive has found a compatible board, simply execute
hpdrive
without any parameters. HPDrive will ask for image files to be used as drive storage, create them if necessary, and then start emulating an HP 9895A floppy disc drive (this is the default). HPDrive normally operates silently and just reports if something didn't work as expected, however you can use the -d option to show drive activity (see options summary below).
Please note that newly created images are always unformatted (just like a factory new disc drive). Use the appropriate formatting command on your host system (e.g. INITIALIZE) or the HPDir utility to create a file system before you can create files, list directories etc.
Using HPDrive
Generally, HPDrive is invoked within a console window from the directory where hpdrive.exe resides with the following syntax:
hpdrive [options][<image> ... ]
All other options are used to configure the emulated drive or for diagnostics. Below is a summary of all options. Execute HPDrive with the -h option for a summary. Also have a look into the README file for up-to-date information.
| Option | Description |
| -h | Output a summary of the command line options. |
| -d | Shows drive activity in terms of seek operations, including the affected records. Seek position refers to the current record address. There is one seek indicator for each unit. |
| -scan | Check for compatible IEEE488/GPIB interface hardware. |
| -9895 | Emulate an HP 9895A dual 8" floppy disc drive with 1.15 MByte per floppy disc (this is the default). |
| -9121 | Emulate an HP 9121D dual 3.5" floppy disc drive with 750 kByte per floppy disc. |
| -82901 | Emulate an HP 98901M dual 5.25" floppy disc drive with 750 kByte per floppy disc. |
| -9134A | Emulate an HP 9133A/9134A/9135A/9133V 5 MByte hard disc drive |
| -9134B | Emulate an HP 9133B/9134B 10 MByte hard disc drive |
| -9134XV | Emulate an HP 9133XV/9134XV 15 MByte hard disc drive |
| -7908 | Emulate an HP 7908 CS80 hard disc drive with 17 MByte hard disc (experimental) |
| -7910 | Emulate an HP 7910 hard disc drive with 12 MByte hard disc |
| -7911 | Emulate an HP 7911 CS80 hard disc drive with 28 MByte hard disc (experimental) |
| -7912 | Emulate an HP 7912 CS80 hard disc drive with 66 MByte hard disc (experimental) |
| -a <address> | Use <address> as primary GPIB address. If omitted, the address defaults to 0. The possible address range is from 0 up to 31, however due to the parallel poll hold-off, only addresses from 0 to 7 should be used for mass storage devices. Address 21 is defacto reserved for the system controller. |
| -n <numdrives> | Use <numdrives> drives. Default for all floppy drives is 1, however the number of emulated drives ca be freely chosen within the supported unit range (normally up to 4 units can be addressed by the HP 9845). |
| -b <board> | In case more than one compatible IEEE488/GPIB board has been detected, a specific board can be selected with this option. <board> refers to the position at which the board is listed with the -scan option. Default is 0 (first board detected). |
| -lf <logfile> | Print all output into <logfile>. Useful especially for diagnostics in combination with the -l option. |
| -l <loglevel> | Specifies detail of HPDrive's reporting. Possible values are 0 (=silent operation, no output except errors), 1 (=output errors and warnings only), 2 (=like 1 plus some basic information - this is the normal mode), 3 (=like 2 plus detailed logging of all HP-IB activity), 4 (=like 3 plus verbose reporting of all data which passes the HP-IB) |
| -e <eoi-delay> | Specify delay between sending the last data byte and asserting the EOI line (default value is 500). |
| -s <send-delay> | Specify delay between releasing hold-off and start sending in ms (default delay is 0). |
| -r <recv-delay> | Specify delay between releasing hold-off and start receiving in ms (default delay is 0). |
| -v | Show version info. |
| -license | Show license info. |
The HPDrive program can be shut down at any time by pressing CTRL-C.
Downloads
Click here for downloading HPDrive:
| HPDrive 2.0 beta 2 Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista: | hpdrive-20beta2.zip |
| Custom TNT4882 Driver 1.0 beta for Windows XP/Vista: | gpibdrv-10beta.zip |
This beta version may still have bugs. It is recommended to make copies from valuable images you are working on in case something goes wrong. Please use the contact feature to let me know if something doesn't work as expected.
The DlPortIO driver package (needed for ISA based GPIB boards under Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista) can be downloaded here.
Please note that, although non-commercial use is still provided free of charge and distribution is encouraged within the Creative Commons Public License, HPDrive is no longer free software. If you plan to use HPDrive within a commercial context, please use the contact feature to ask for commercial conditions.
The change in licensing has become necessary in order to provide a minimum of protection towards existing offers of other commercial solution vendors, since due to the support of contemporary GPIB hardware the functionality of HPDrive and HPDir is no longer restricted to pure vintage technology.
Working with Binary Images
The image files which are used by HPDrive can be accessed by another utility, the HPDir program. Besides copying files to and from an image file, HPDir supports a number of other operations on images, like creating and initializing images, generating directory listings, creating and deleting different types of files inside an image, setting file attributes and much more. See the HPDir Project for information on this really versatile and useful program.
If you are looking for software to test HPDrive with, I recommend a visit to hpmuseum.net. There is much software available, especially for the HP 9845 series. Note that the software there is packaged with Teledisk, an ancient disc image utility. I've written a program which does the transformation from Teledisk images into hpi images for most of the packages available at hpmuseum. See the Software Section on this site for more information.
Troubleshooting
Here are some hints for the most common problems:
| Symptom | Likely Cause | Procedure |
| Supported GPIB Board is not detected | Board is set to the wrong I/O base address (ISA boards only) | Either set the board to a supported I/O base or use the -port option |
| DLPortIO driver is not installed (ISA boards under NT/2000/XP/Vista only) | Install the DLPortIO driver | |
| Custom TNT4882 driver is not installed (PCI boards only) and/or standard NI 488.2 driver still present | If present, uninstall NI 488.2 driver, install the custom TNT4882 driver | |
| HPDrive can't be used from your vintage host system | IEEE488 cabeling restrictions violated | Check your GPIB cabeling, connect host and PC exclusively |
| GPIB address duplication | Check for other devices on the bus with equal GPIB address. If necessary, use the -a option | |
| Other devices on the bus won't work when HPDrive is running | Known issue, but the cause is not yet identified | Check for unique GPIB addresses. Tell me about the host/device combination you are using |
| HPDrive won't work with logging enabled | Sometimes happens with slower systems (Pentium and below) when too much processing is needed to produce (and scroll) log output so that timing constraints of the hosts GPIB driver get violated. Mostly with lazy implemented drivers like ROM based boot loaders. | If logging is needed, use the -lf switch to log into file instead to standard output |
Also check the README in the HPDrive package for troubleshooting procedures.
If you can't solve the problem, use the options "-l 4 -lf <logfile>" to create a detailed log of what has happened and sent it to me.