Deleting ROM Applications from Menu

The “More Applications” menu in a stock 200LX has a bunch of icons that I personally will never use. Particularily annoying to me are all of the green hardware button applications also take up an Icon space in the More Apps menu. This is redundant and wasteful, to me. There’s only a limited number of Icons anyhow, which makes it even worse that it comes full of un-deletable hard-coded ones.
Fortunately it’s not that hard to get rid of them after all, if you have a hex editor.

Close the More Applications program – in fact close the whole System Manager so you are in just DOS. The file you want to work with is c:\_dat\appmgr.dat. Make a backup of it. Then open it in your favorite DOS-based hex editor.

This file is basically a database of fixed-length, which can hold up to 32 entries.  The entries are 115 bytes long, and most (but not all) begin with a hex number, from 00 to 1F (0 to 31). Viewing this file in your hex editor, you’ll see the App Name as it appears in the app manager, and the program name or path depending if it’s a built-in application or one you’ve added.  There is some ‘code’ preceeding and trailing this, which can include stuff like the hotkeys to launch the app, the icon index, etc.

To remove an app that you can’t delete the normal way, just null its entry out.  The safest way to do this is first move the app you want to remove to the end of the list.  Then exit the app manager, edit the appmgr.dat file in your hex editor, and null out its 115 bytes to 0×00 (hex 00). Once you have nulled it out, when you restart the App Manager, you will see the builtin app is gone, and now that ’slot’ is available for you to reuse for your own apps.

 

 

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Re-Assigning Green Hardware Keys

The hard-wired green keys do lots of great stuff, but a few of them are things I don’t like or will never use. Particularily frustrating for me is the NoteTaker / Memo key. I never use Memos, but I use NoteTaker all the time. And the Quicken and Lotus keys… I never use those at all, ever, period. Fortunately there’s a built-in program that lets you re-assign, disable, or tinker with these keys!

The program is Key200. You can read all about it at d:\bin\key200.txt. Here’s the quick version though:
Add the following line to your autoexec.bat: D:\bin\key200.com c:\_dat\key200.ini Then create c:\_dat\key200.ini and you can get started. My key200.ini file looks like this:

^More More : More ^More Menu ^Menu A ^A T ^T Enter ^Enter
Memo : Ctrl Memo ^Memo ^Ctrl
123 : Ctrl 123 ^123 ^Ctrl
Quick :
Ctrl Quick :
Ctrl Appt :
Ctrl More :

What all this means is: The first line captures two More presses in a row, and shuts down the System Manager. The second line re-assigns the Memo key to Ctrl Memo which is NoteTaker – so whether I Ctrl or not, I get NoteTaker when I use the Memo key. The third line re-assigns 123 to Ctrl 123 which is DOS – so both Ctrl 123 and just 123 give me DOS. The remaining lines de-activate keys – Quick, Ctrl Quick, Ctrl Appt, and Ctrl More, are all disabled. Those keystrokes now do nothing.

What you can see is we’re using names of the green keys, plus the control key. A ^ infront of the key name means it is released. So Memo ^Memo means press memo then release memo.

All this is explained in d:\bin\key200.txt but what is really cool is this – instead of disabling keys you don’t use, you can re-assign them to do things that are completely different. What you do is create a bunch of Macros, using the Macro program (Ctrl More). Then use key200.ini to reassign an green key, to a macro key! So anything you can do with a Macro, you can launch from a single green-key press.
I’d give you some examples, but my Macro program is disabled

 

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PassGen Program
I hadn’t thought to include this originally, but it was requested so here it is. PassGen is a little program I wrote, to generate random passwords. It’s not for cracking or hacking. It’s for system or network admins who have to constantly issue random passwords to users.

What it does is ask if you want to use a seed, then asks how many characters the password should be, then if it should include Upper Case, lower case, numeric, and punctuation characters. Then it spits out a random string that fits the parameters it was given.

It’s super-simple. The only thing that needs explanation is the seed part. If you give it a seed string, it will use that seed as the start of the random generator. This is not truly random, but it’s pretty random. If you use the same seed and same parameters, you will always get the same result string.
So if you use your first name as the string, select an 8-character password with lower-case and numeric characters, then every time you use those parameters you will get the same result. This is handy if you need to recover a password, and you remember what params you used.

If you don’t use a seed string, then it will mash something up internally that is a lot more random. You won’t be able to rebuild the password though, which is the point of not using a seed string.

PassGen is a compiled Basic program, it’s about 28k in size, it is offered here for free as in beer, use it, enjoy it, but I retain the copyrights. It should work on any DOS system but is written for the HP 200LX. The zip file includes an icon for the 200LX More Applications program. There are no warranties, expressed or implied, and I am not responsible for any problems you may experience from using this software.
PassGen.zip