Putting PC-GEOS on the GRiDPad 1910

Putting GEOS on a GRiDPad 1910 is fairly trivial, assuming you can get the files there in the first place. I sent an email to someone back in 1995 which says most of the same things I say here, but I may have left something out of one file or the other. You can find the file attached to the bottom of this node as "geosinst.txt". The best way to go about all this is to use Palm Connect, if you have access to it - This is PC-GEOS 2.0, which came with a serial cable that connected a Zoomer to a PC. (The same cable, with a null modem adapter and a gender changer, lets you hook up printers, modems and whatnot to your zoomer.) The big deal about THIS particular revision of PC-GEOS is that it comes with handwriting recognition, a notepad app that's fairly decent, a datebook, and a phone directory.

Everything I write about here assumes you installed Palm Connect and not some other flavor of PC-GEOS 2.0; That means no New Deal Publishing stuff, etc. You can probably install those applications seperately.

Also, I Was lucky enough to GET my GRiDPad with Microsoft INTERLNK.EXE and INTERSVR.EXE on it; I got INTERSVR.EXE seperately, put it on my PC, ran it there sharing only drive A:, where I put telix.exe. After downloading telix, transfer just telix.exe over, and run it - you will need the onscreen keyboard or a real keyboard for this step.

After setting up telix (it's pretty self-explanatory), zmodem over the files to install PalmConnect with. Run the install, which will take a good long time.

NOW comes the stupid part. Palm Connect does not lay down cga.geo in PALMCONN\SYSTEM\VIDEO, which is the video driver you NEED to use the gridpad video (which there is a seperate config entry for.) I don't know if you will be able to use the installer's "install a single file" capability for this. I cheated, and had New Deal Publisher also installed on my machine, and I just copied the file from there. Your solution may be different.

Okay, so get the CGA.GEO file into PALMCONN\SYSTEM\VIDEO, and run setup.bat. This will kick off a setup procedure. If you don't already have it and have it loaded, BEFORE that step you will need to get and/or run penmouse.com, which is the mouse driver for the GRiDPad pen. This driver is linked at the bottom of this node.

Upon running setup you will find that the default video is VGA 16 color. While this would be just ducky, it's not going to happen, sucker. Hit F10 (You can see you'll need a keyboard for this, since it's graphical...) to select another type of video device. Up a few lines should be "Gridpad: 640x400 Mono" or some such. That's your driver, so select it and wait. When the screen comes up properly (you hope) you can hit enter to continue.

The default mouse is "No Idea". Change this to "Generic Digitizer". The reasoning behind that is that the driver provides absolute coordinates, not relative like a mouse - X and Y, not more X and less Y. :) This should work okay.
NOTE: On my original GRiDPad I didn't have this particular problem, but on this one when I have the keyboard plugged in the pen doesn't play well with others. You can however seem to plug and unplug the keyboard with impunity, so don't worry about that. Just plug it in when you need it, unplug it when you need to use the pen. You'll be freeing yourself of the keyboard toward the end of this exercise anyhow, so don't stress it.

Select no printer unless you have one installed right now; It will force you to print a test page if you say you have one. You can always change it later from the printer preferences panel.

Okay, now you have GEOS 2.x installed. It has some crappy handwriting recognition you can use, but I don't advise it. What you really want to do is install Graffiti for GEOS. Finding it is your problem until I check the legality of distributing it... But once you do, it's now a real bitch to install the first time. Once you know what you're doing (In this case, through me) it's trivial.

First of all, there's a file in the distribution called GRAFINST.SDF. This is the file that tells the installer what to do. Well, what DO you do? I'll just tell you.

First of all, get the following files to the pad:

GRAFFITI.MCR HWRROM.GEO GRAFFITI.000

• This is the important stuff. The GRAFT.GEO file is the Graffiti tutorial; Useless anywhere but on a zoomer, since it doesn't work on the gridpad. Now comes the lame part:
• On the gridpad, CD into \PALMCONN\SYSTEM. In here is a file called PALM.GEO. Rename this to something with a different extension, in case you want it back; I called him PALM.GE_.
• Copy HWRROM.GEO into this directory. You may or may not have to rename it PALM.GEO. I did, taking no chances.
• Put GRAFFITI.MCR in \PALMCONN\PRIVDATA\HWR.
• Put GRAFFITI.000 in \PALMCONN\USERDATA\HELP.

Congratulations, you have installed Graffiti on your gridpad with palm connect. I SUSPECT that this will work with the New Deal Publisher stuff, so you can just slap the files in, grab the notepad and such from palm connect, and actually have a word processor too. This will be my next experiment, since there's plenty of room for two installs of PC-GEOS on that machine.

There are also some GEOS.INI file tweaks you may want to make. My GEOS.INI file is included below. The only stuff I strongly suggest you change are the entries that refer to being penbased, and having a keyboard. ALSO, the GEOS.INI for 2.0 FAQ says that you can tell GEOS that a drive doesn't exist; If you don't have a flash ram card you may want to put the following line in the [system] section:
drive a = 0

I have not tested this yet.

GEOS.INI

[system]
continueSetup = false
setupMode = 0
serialnumber = 1000-0022-0278-1056
penBased = true

[input]
reboot on reset = false
noKeyboard = true

[ui]
haveEnvironmentApp = false
penInputDisplayType = 0
confirmShutdown = false
backgroundcolor = 8
execOnStartup = Alarm
noTaskSwitcher = true
remoteClipPort = 2
remoteBaudRate = 12

[uiFeatures]
defaultLauncher = File Manager
interfaceLevel = 3
interfaceOptions = 24576
launchModel = 1
launchLevel = 3
docControlFSLevel = 0
docControlOptions = 19392
expressOptions = 2377
helpOptions = 0
windowOptions = 65298

[screen 0]
device = GridPad: 640x400 Mono
driver = ATT6300 Monochrome Driver

[motifOptions]
fsStaticDriveMoniker = true
scroll arrow size = 10
clickSounds = false

[expressMenuControl]
otherAppSubMenu = false
runSubMenu = false

[keyboard]
device = U.S. Keyboard
driver = kbd.geo

[mouse]
info = 16384
device = Generic Digitizer
driver = Absolute Generic Mouse

[prefmgr]
timeout = 1

[Palm Computing, Inc.]
Palm Search String = E0
penBased = true

[serial]
port1 = 4
port2 = 3

[parallel]
port1 = 7

[Net Library]
domainName = /COMM
InitDrivers = comm.geo

[Link]
drives = C:
name = Pad
port = 1
baudRate = 12

[task driver]
driver = Non-Switching Task Driver
device = No Task-Switcher

[Graffiti Recognition]