Toyland - HP 360LX

My newest 'toy' came in today and I'm very pleased. Works perfectly with very minor cosmetic issues. I'm especially pleased with it's visibility in the sunshine for my tired old eyes.
I was a little miffed that it couldn't see the files on the only CF card I have. It's the same one that I used for my linux experiments in my J820 thread. I thought that the 360LX would be able to read the first partition on the card but, of course, not the Ext2 second partition. I think the first partition is Fat 16, but I'll have to check it.
In the first picture the only card that I believe works is the 3Com 56K pcmcia modem card. When I plug it in the device does NOT ask for a driver, as it did with Netgear and Orinoco cards, and the little slide out connector for the phone line blinks a couple of times. I'll test it more thoroughly later.
I was also disappointed with the Toshiba micro-drive. It just sits there and churns untill I gave up on it. Not enough memory??
I did get the device to sync with the same old Win ME desktop to which I sync my J820.
More 'fun' tomorrow.









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Very nice, congrats on the find.

Nice!

The Microdrive issue is a known one https://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/h/0001.asp there's something between it and the ATA driver in 2.00 that doesn't play well.

. . . and of course with the ORiNOCO card it's a simple matter of installing the Lucent WaveLAN driver:

https://www.hpcfactor.com/downloads/details.asp?r={A93E87AC-41C5-4C5...

Thanks @HPC:Fan
@C:Amie That's a 'bummer' about the micro-drives.
@CE Geek Thanks for the link. I may try that later. I'm not currently running a 'home' network and as my experience using the Orinoco card on my J820 shows, surfing on these old devices is no longer a very viable option unless one is visiting 'Gopher' holes.
Anybody have any experience with an Edup 5 In 1 PC Card Adapter MCR-5A in one of these devices? Other suggestions welcome.

Edit: Also wondering about a good brand of Nimh batteries that would work.

Edited by Mjolnir 2020-04-24 2:26 PM

Bought one off 'Fleabay' today. Should be here Monday or Tuesday, guess we'll know more then although I still don't have an extra CF card. I do have a couple of 'memory sticks' and an SD card... somewhere.

The EDUP 5in1 MCR-5A PC Card Adapter worked fine in both my HP 360LX and my Jornada 820. Neither device asked for a driver and both 'saw' and wrote to both a 256MB SanDisk Memory Stick Pro (MagicGate) and a 256MB SanDisk SD card. I made a submission to the HCL. Later I will try it with my Husky FEX21.





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Had some fun this morning converting some pictures and displaying them on my 360LX. I reduced a 870x448 903kb .PNG file I had to 620x319 97kb .jpg and loaded it on my device - worked fairly well.







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You could try converting them to a 2-bit per pixel gif on the PC too, for better quality dithering!

I tried using Photoshop for dithering, so this may or may not look better on the HPC







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@Karpour Thanks for the response. Your photo displays fairly well on the 360LX. In the end, after several tests, I ended up walking the 'colors' up to the limit (256) and used 320x240 for picture boundaries. As long as the pictures were under 100kb they opened fairly quickly and had a lot of clarity. Different picture for example.

identify Sandy.jpg 
Sandy.jpg JPEG 2592x1936 2592x1936+0+0 8-bit sRGB 1.458MB 0.000u 0:00.009 

 

convert Sandy.jpg -resize 320x240 -colorspace gray +dither -colors 256 -auto-level Sandy5.gif 

 

identify Sandy5.gif 

Sandy5.gif GIF 320x239 320x239+0+0 8-bit sRGB 256c 83.9KB 0.000u 0:00.000

Edited by Mjolnir 2020-05-12 7:58 PM






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You can also use
https://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/s/0013.asp

or Photoshop:
https://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/s/0022.asp

Thanks for the info. I'll have to try that out. While I was playing around yesterday I also used 'convert' in a WSL terminal to take some fairly large .bmps from that never finished family history that I'm sure several of us have tucked somewhere into a hard drive and convert them into small .jpgs and gifs that displayed very well on my 360LX.

identify mom-dad.bmp 
mom-dad.bmp BMP3 2085x1354 2085x1354+0+0 8-bit sRGB 8.471MB 0.030u 0:00.030 

 

convert mom-dad.bmp -resize 320x240 -colorspace gray +dither -colors 256 -auto-level mom-dad4.gif 

 

identify mom-dad4.gif 

mom-dad4.gif GIF 320x208 320x208+0+0 8-bit sRGB 256c 54.9KB 0.000u 0:00.000 

 

identify mom-dad.jpg 

mom-dad.jpg JPEG 320x208 320x208+0+0 8-bit sRGB 80.4KB 0.010u 0:00.009

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I installed BMP2BP ENG on my Win ME sych machine and dropped the 8mb .bmp file into the window. I then saved it in 'monochrome' resulting in a 700kb .2bp file. It looked very well on my 360LX but did take a second or two to open up. I was quite surprised that neither Paint or Inkscape (ported) on Widows 10 or ImageMagick in a WSL terminal would 'touch' it when I tried to resize it.

identify mom-dad1.2bp 
identify-im6.q16: unrecognized bits per pixel `mom-dad1.2bp' @ error/bmp.c/ReadBMPImage/842. 

 

convert MOM-DAD1.2bp -resize 320x240 MOM-DAD2.2bp 

 

convert-im6.q16: unrecognized bits per pixel `MOM-DAD1.2bp' @ error/bmp.c/ReadBMPImage/842. 

convert-im6.q16: no images defined `MOM-DAD2.2bp' @ error/convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/3258.

Edited by Mjolnir 2020-05-13 5:42 PM






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It's weird (see other thread). 2BP really just is a BMP with 2 bits per pixel, while 4 bits per pixel and up would be a regular file. So while I guess officially 2bpp isn't a valid bmp, parsing it is so easy that I don't know why imagemagick wouldn't support it. I guess none of the devs really cared for it

So few people ever encountered the format, in practice by the end of 1997 and colour H/PC's, no one needed it. It is super easy to implement though, in terms of read/write logic.