Hello everyone, I'm new here, and I run a dedicated HP DOS Palmtop YouTube channel

Hi everyone,

I just found this website and forum and I just signed up
My name is Terrence Vergauwen, I'm currently living in New Zealand since 15 years,
after moving here from Belgium.

A few months ago I started a new YouTube channel called "HP Palmtop Tube",
here's a link to the Main channel page:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCVChzZ62a-c4MdJWyRwdCQ

My primary focus of the channel is the MS-DOS based palmtops from HP,
the 95LX, and particularly the 100LX and 200LX DOS based palmtops.

Instead of doing reviews etc... I make videos where I set up exotic hardware configurations,
operating systems and try to make these old, nostalgic machines do crazy things,
like adding a SCSI bus to a 200LX with 4 hard drives, a ZIP drive, CD-ROM drive and flatbed scanner, all at once,
or I've released part 1 of a 2 or 3 part series where I build a UNIX webserver on a 200LX by installing,
finetuning and connecting to my network a HP200LX running Minix 2.0.2

I also review games in my "Will it Play?" series, where I give scores in a chart, not about the actual game,
but about it's suitability or playing on the palmtop.

I also have a number of parallel port sounds cards like the OPL3LPT (Adlib compatible) and S2P (General MIDI synth, can emulate an MT-32 too),
that I connect to the palmtop and patch games and i've got a number of games from the end of the 80's and early 90's with those sound cards on the channel too,
aswell as a 4 channell MOD player that plays quite decent quality music with a COVOX DAC on the parallel port.

My channel is only 3 months old, and I have a lot to learn about the art of YouTube video production,
and being slightly autistic and very nervous, I tend to sound somewhat disorganized, due to being nervous,
when narrating my videos, but, I'm getting better and better all the time.

I have a whole series of upcoming ideas for interesting videos where I do crazy things nobody were possible on such a small / slow machine,
so expect a lot of upcoming, educational and great videos about all kinds of HP DOS Palmtop uses, so if you subscribe and hit the bell icon,
you'll be alerted to those coming out.

I only have 140 subscribers at the time of writing this post, and am only getting a hundred or so views per video on average,
sometimes more , sometimes less, but I really need more viewers, subscribers, and people leaving likes and comments,
so the YouTube algorithm will create more impressions of my videos to new viewers and get more peope to see my videos.

The viewers have all expressed that they find my videos, although it's for a small/niche audience, extremely good and interesting,
which fuels my motivation to make more videos

So check out my channnel, there's about 2 dozen or so videos on it for you to watch already...

Thanks for your time!,
Terrence Vergauwen

Hi Terrence,

Welcome aboard this great forum!

Glad to have you here and all your excellent YT videos.

Others and I have already been mentioning your videos on these forums recently.

Good timing of your post as we just launched a new DOS Palmtop forum section a few days ago.

Several of us will be posting How To's, Resource Links, etc, on this new forum. So, we can mention your video channel.

Would be interested to see more videos on useful ways to use the 200LX and more about what programs are available to run on 200LX in Minix, etc.

See you around here....

Best,

Mark

Hi ArchiMark,

Thanks for the warm welcome

I've got a long list of interesting, feasible ideas for videos to make during 2022, all crazy stuff that takes the 200LX to it's maximum potential.
I plan on releasing part 2 of the Minix video series in a week or so,
and I will be configuring and building a kernel with the TCP/IP stack enabled for networking,
and hooking it up to a raspberry PI with PPP over a null modem serial cable for IP access to my network.

Finally, and this will probably be in a 3rd video, I will try to (depending on the remaining amount of memory free) setup a permanent http server,
with a small website (very small/efficient hand written HTML, with very small jpeg and png images).

I've fiber and a fixed IP at home, and I own the palmtoptube.com domain, so I will be making this system run 24/7,
serving up a simple website with a repository of files for download. (200LX games, software, drivers, etc...)
Probably up to 2GB or so of files (that's the maximum size of a compatible partition) , and my CF card is 2GB in size...

There is'nt much that you can do on minix 2.0 with such a small amount of memory (640KB which holds DOS, the Minix Kernel (200kb) and leaves only approx 400kb for user-space processes) other than editing files with a small text editor like vi or pico

It is, however, thanks to it's full multi-user, preemptive multitasking UNIX-like kernel, the perfect platform to run a www (httpd webserver), ftp (ftpd fileserver) and/or smtp (simple mail transfer protocol) server on, depending on memory use.

I might have to resort to a small 10kb or so http server that I wrote a few years ago as a hobby project, it's a simple HTTP GET only HTTP 1.1 compliant server that can serve static websites. With this, I can launch a small pool of these processes say 5 or so, and they communicate via Unix IPC (inter process communication), so when a request arrives, it's handed to an idle process in the pool, and then that process breaks down the request and transfers the requested file, and then closes the connection and becomes available again. That way the server can handle multiple requests at the same time, without resorting to forking a new process for every connection, as creating a new process is extremely slow on such a slow machine, it can take up to half a second, sometimes even more. And due to the lack of threads (pthreads) on Minix 2.0, the server described above is the best solution...

I might add some code and tweak it a bit to maybe add some capabilities for dynamic content by adding functionality to accept POST requests and launch a cgi-bin executable to generate dynamic content... this can be a very small binary written in C that has a text-file with key/value pairs or something to store data, so it will be a very simple, C based sort of php/mysql equivalent concept. Building and running apache / php / mysql is completely out of the question as you need many megabytes of memory to even compile it, let alone run it in 400kb of user-space memory

So, I've got a lot of work ahead of me

BTW, Should I make my future announcements for new videos in this news forum, or in the new DOS Palmtop section of the forum ?

Cheers,
Terrence

Thanks for all your info and input, Terrence. Very helpful and look forward to your upcoming videos.

Understand situation with Minix now.

Yes, looks like you have plenty to keep you busy now.

As for announcements.....good questions....

Maybe for now, put them in both to maximize exposure of your work to everyone here.
And the new DOS Palmtop forum section is brand new. So, will take a bit for everyone to notice it.
Having said this, our fearless leader, C:Amie, may have a different view on this....and if so, will likely chime in here....

Best,

Mark

Edited by ArchiMark 2022-01-03 2:00 AM

The latter would be preferred.

Moved to DOS Palmtops

Hi H/PC Oracle,

Nice to meet you

I understand why you moved my topics into this forum, but,
Am I allowed, in the future to make a post here announcing a new video in detail, and maybe make a small post with a link to a post in this forum in the main news forum (the first forum on the top of the list of forums) ?
It would make it much more visible to people, instead of being hidden away in a small forum deep down the list...
It will also make people who aren't into DOS palmtops capable of seeing the announcement, and learn about HP DOS Palmtops...

Would that be ok ?

Thanks for your time!,
Terrence

Edited by radiance32 2022-01-03 3:03 AM

radiance32,

No, please do not double post. It is annoying for others in the community to see a post twice. Most people rely on the latest threads ticker to see what changes overnight and there is no value for them in seeing your material twice - it is just spammy.

News is a news board and this is a tech support board. While I don't mind a little light-weight self promotion and am happy to help our community. We do not exist to bolster anyone's SEO or be an extension of or bypass to the YouTube latest posts page. Our purpose is to exist to serve the needs of our community of users.

So in summary, what I'm saying is that if you want to be an active and constructive part of our community, I don't mind you talking about your channel - within reason. If you just want to post links to your video's as a bypass for the YouTube home page. Then you can expect some push back from the mods.

Sound fair?

Sound fair to me,

Rest assured I'm not here to abuse this forum to promote my videos,
I'm much more interested in discussing technicalities around DOS palmtops...

But, I hope you understand, I'm putting a large amount of work into my videos,
and its hard nowadays to get a decent amount of people to find them,
as YouTube has millions of youtubers churning out videos of people getting a million views for eating a cactus or something,
and the algorithm isn't very nice to educational videos, resulting in sometimes only 90 views or so over a few months for a video
that took a month to research and record...

But that's fine, I'll just show some of my more technical/interesting/educational videos here in the DOS Palmtop channel...

BTW, is there a way to delete a post ? Like my accidental double post above ?

Radiance

Edited by radiance32 2022-01-03 7:32 PM

Welcome here, radiance32. I took care of that double post.

As for your youtube conundrum, I think a way will open, as the Quakers say. As you already know, DOS Palmtop info these days is catch-as-catch-can, so if the new subforum here becomes a regular site for users, you could get the response you want.

I very much have enjoyed your videos and can't imagine that others won't as well, once they know of them.

One thing I can do, within the DOS Palmtop forum, is maintain your own video thread there--if you need to add another video to your posting, and your time for editing has expired, just PM me a note and I'll put in whatever update you wish.

Jake

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to respond

Creating my own videos thread sounds awesome
Would you be able to pin it so it stays on the first page ? That way it does'nt dissapear into obscurity a few pages of forum topics down the line...
I've noticed that on most forums, once your thread dissapears from the 1st page of a forum, onto the 2nd page,
nobody notices it anymore as people only check the first page.

Would that be possible, or am I asking too much ?
Let me know what you think, and either way, I'm happy to do whatever you think is best,
it's your forum in the end
I'm already really happy that I found an active / larger forum with specific users and forums dedicated to HP DOS Palmtops,
where we can all discuss how to make these awesome pieces of nostalgia do things people would think were impossible
I've a long list of really interesting topics for videos I'll be making during 2022, including stuff like raytracing (with a 200LX connected to mains power and running for a month to render one image with path tracing), my web/ftp server on Minix, and much more...

Cheers,
Terrence

BTW,

I was thinking of making a short video about "Where to get help and discuss technical issues regarding DOS Pamtops",
where I point out some places where people can go, and I think the DOS Palmtop forum here would be a perfect candidate
to tell my viewers about so they can come here , register and ask technical questions in DOS Palmtops forum...

Are you ok with that ?

Terrence

I am looking into keeping key threads first and foremost. This site has been expertly run for multiple decades, so if stickies can't be done, there's a good reason for it.

As for your where-to-find-help idea, that's fortuitous. Archimark is already compiling an extensive list of just that. My hope is to have that thread readily available and just one thread in total (for easy finding)--meaning that users could PM me (or simply post) with additions, which I will insert into said thread and heap loads of credit on the helpful contributor.

Your video would be equally welcome, though we'd rather have both--your video and your written recommendations

Jake

radiance32,

My only concern here is fairness for others in the community and in that we are treating you and other YouTubers equally. I will discuss it with Jake (your benevolent mod) and go from there. My thinking at the moment is to create a thread for the DOS Palmtop community to post YT video's in; rather than you having your own personal channel thread. Like I say, I'll discuss it with the mods.

I've no problem at all with supporting your channel; any more than I am with supporting fantablium's Handheld Computing channel. It just needs to be fair on everyone in our community and to the wide variety of interests that folks here have.

The other thread can stay open as a discussion of what it is; SCSI on the 200 series. I don't think you've seen my reply to you in there from this morning as I think that gives you my answer to your question

I just replied to it in the SCSI thread...
I'm happy to do what you asked in your last post in that thread...

Cheers,
Terrence