Putting GEOS on a GRiDPad 1910 is fairly trivial, assuming you can get the files there in the first place. 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. 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.

Upon running setup you will find that the default video is VGA 16 color. Hit F10 (You can see you'll need a keyboard for this, since it's graphic...) 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. It's a pain to install the first time. Once you know what you're doing 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 it 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.

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


Side Notes
You may need to change the display driver to "ATT6300.GEO".

Depending on the version of GEOS, you may have to rename loader.exe to loadervg.exe and rename loadercg.exe to loader.exe.

If the pen doesn't work, you can set the driver manually: Change the mouse driver to "absgen.geo".

You may also wish to look into the programs "mark" and "rel" s (which should be available on simtel) that remove TSRs from memory. Just the thing for nuking the mouse driver if you need to.