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DAUPHIN-L: Dauphin memory, drive, pen, modem, battery and recognition Q&A.





On Wed, 18 Oct 1995, Lee Kwong Shui Fong wrote:

> 1) Is the 2-meg RAM upgrade requiring some kind of proprietary SIMM (ie. 
> can I buy it myself from somewhere and bung it in myself?)
> 
> 2) Is there anyway to upgrade the internal hard-drive?  I was told it was 
> NOT a 2.5", but some kind of weird PCMCIA type of device.  Is this true?  
> (I have an old 80meg 2.5" I'd love to stick inside).
> 
> 3) Do the wireless pens have a habit of self-destructing?  (Mine has)
> 
> 4) How about upgrading the internal modem? (14.4K would be nice!)  (28.8 
> would be nicer!)
> 
> 5) How much will all of this cost? (Probably too much for this newly 
> unemployed ex-student, but anyway...)
> 
> 6) Any tips on prolonging battery life beyond on max 1.5 hours I can get 
> out of it?  Anybody rigged up any external portable power-supplies?  (I 
> was thinking of stringing together some hi-capacity D size Nicads...)
> 
> 7) Does anyone really bother to use the handwriting recognition?  Has 
> there been an upgrade to Windows for Pen 1.

Dear Lee:

I'll take a crack at your questions-

1) I don't know much about the memory used in the DTR-1, but from what 
bit of net.wisdom that I've gathered, it is not likely to be easily done.
I believe the memory is proprietary and some other hardware modification 
may be needed. In any case, I recall one poster who noted that he 
damaged the ribbon cable to the display when he was mucking around in
his machine, and had a very difficult bit of soldering to do to
repair it.

2) I know of no way to upgrade the hard drive. The drives are from
HP, and are of the "Kittyhawk" line of drives which were made only
briefly, and came in only 20 and 40 meg sizes.They are not PCMCIA drives,
but may be IDE compatible, if one knew pin-outs etc. Unfortunately,
these drives are smaller than 2.5 inch drives. I believe the external
floppy connector has pins that may support standard IDE drives, but
I don't know what the pin-out for the connector is, and I've never
heard of anyone getting this to work. Dauphin did sell an 80 meg
external drive with interchangeable disks, but these were very expensive
and are probably not available. I recall one report of 
success using the "zip" drives, but several others have reported trouble
getting the parallel port to work properly for various sorts of I/O.

3) The pens are a frequent source of trouble. Besides the obvious trouble
shooting (batteries, cleaning tip, stay away from monitor when using),
I have heard no good tips to improve a pen that behaves somewhat 
erratically. If your pen is completely dead, other similar cordless pens
may be compatible, but these are expensive ~$70. The problem may
be in the main unit rather than the pen itself.

4) Upgrading the internal modem would be extremely difficult. External
modems are limited by the use of the slower UARTs for the serial port.
(I don't recall the number- 8460 in the DTR versus 16550 in newer 
machines??) I have heard this limits external modem speed to around 9600
bps, although some people claim 14.4k works as well. Undoubtedly, 28.8
would not achieve full speed. Battery powered external modems are less
common than they were before PCMCIA, but are still available, although
obviously cumbersome. I have seen 28.8 modems (Microcom?) that plug
into the parallel port, and these may overcome the speed problem with
the external serial port UART. Unfortunately, I've never seen a portable
model that uses the parallel port. Also, these may require special
software or drivers which may not suit your purposes, and I've mentioned
that some people have had problems with parallel port I/O devices.

5) The battery life is frightfully brief. Others have described 
various conditioning regimines that can extend this by a few minutes. 
I have done a bit of battery shopping for alternative internal or
external power sources, and have not come up with much. Dauphin
did sell an external battery pack, but this was very expensive (around
$700 when I checked about a year ago) and is not likely to be available. 
I recall one user who used a pack of AA batteries, but had very poor 
battery life. I don't recall his design, but he reported 45-60 minute
life. D's would work better, but there is the obvious bulk. 
I considered a camcorder type battery pack the most likely candidate. 
Although these are mostly proprietary designs, you could certainly
find an appropriate one. Cost around $40 for lead-acid type. Sony 
lithium ion camcorder batteries could work nicely and would be fairly
compact, but are costly. ~$65, and several would be needed.
	One other factor to be aware of when diddling with the power supply
is that the DTR can be very finicky when it comes to the power brick
used. I bought a Radio Shack transmorgifier and burnt out the whatzit 
in my own machine. Now my machine will not charge the battery when
it is plugged in, so I must charge the battery out of the machine. 
I have rigged contacts to the battery pack that I attach directly 
to the power pack. It requires a similar length of time to charge,
and the battery life is unchanged. Although somewhat inconvenient, I
am able to use the machine with one battery while the spare battery 
is being charged. 

6) There have been no updates of Win for Pen. The Concerto camp reports
success with OS2 for pen, but I have never heard of it working on a DTR.
There are other pen operating systems - pen DOS and penright for DOS and 
more recently for windows. I have no knowledge of these OS's. I have also 
heard that GEOS works well with pen machines, but I don't know if it 
works on the DTR. A trial version is available on the net, so it would 
not be difficult to test. I don't think handwriting rec is supported, but 
there may be a pop-up keyboard. This might ease the strain on your 
hardware resources as well.

7) Handwriting is a difficult nut to crack. I have had some success
by re-defining a character set through the Win for Pen trainer that is 
limited to lower case, numbers, and a few other characters, and then
defined these with single pen strokes. The strokes are very similar 
to the way Graffiti  gestures and it's predecessor -the Unistroke 
alphabet are defined. Then I have set the recognition delay to the
minimum, and let the computer recognize one letter at a time. There
are some problems with this method, but it is the most useful 
way that I have found to use recognition. There are at least two
other recognizers available that can be used instead of microsoft's 
standard one. One is Lexicus longhand which claims to recognize 
cursive writing. I don't know if these are better than microsoft's 
version. At one time, a version of Graffiti for Win for Pen was
supposed to be in the works, but I don't know if this is still the 
case. 






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