HP 95LX - System Peculiarities

System Peculiarities
A Big Screen vs. a Little Window
Most DOS-based programs are designed for full-size screens (80 characters by 25
lines)—not the 40-character-by-16-line-screen of the HP 95LX. So when you run
a DOS program on the HP 95L.X you see only a portion of the full-sized screen. But
the entire 80 x 25 screen is there—and there are two ways you can see it:
Move the large screen so thatit appearsin the smaller HP95LX “window.” This
is called cursor tracking because you move the screen by moving the cursor; the
cursor is always in the window.
Move the smaller window around the larger screen regardless of where the
cursor is. You do this with (ALT}-arrow key combinations:
moves one character right (J moves to the far right
moves one character left >) moves to the far left
2([2|Z|= (===
LION
moves one line up <>) moves to the top
moves one line down >) moves to the bottom
Incompatible Programs
Because the HP 95LX runs MS-DOS 3.22, it can successfully run many DOS
programs (though some will function differently due to the smaller screen size).
However, some things will prevent a program from running at all:
A program that won’t run on a monochrome display won’t run on the HP 95LX.
You can’t run any program that attempts to access, adjust, or rearrange the
program code of any built-in application. For example, several Add-In pro-
grams for Lotus 1-2-3 that were developed for desktop PCs accomplish their
tasks by “optimizing” the copy of the 1-2-3 program that is loaded into RAM.
But because the 1-2-3 code on the HP 95LX is “read-only” (ROM) and cannot
be changed, these Add-In programs crash when they attempt to change or move
the code (“well-behaved” programs aren’t supposed to change other programs’
code, but not all popular programs are “well-behaved”).
If a program needs more RAM, you'll need a plug-in RAM card (see page 129).
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