Easy telopper 2 cartridge

Do not worry, no need to contribute. All good. Once everything arrives I will check the state of everything. No one really knows if the disks work, if the cartridge is fine, etc. It was a bet (an expensive one) in an effort to preserve all around the HBF/HBI-900, what seems to have failed so far with existing owners.
I know people with these AND all the disks that refuse to make copies/preserve them. Shame.

CR

I got this yesterday on Auction (18€) :

Ok some great news and a bit puzzled so far. The box arrived today. It is the original box where the cartridge came, with the plastic sleeve for the disks and a registration card. It is missing the manual though. It also came with the two original disks that came with the actual HB-F900 machine ("Wordship") and the two disks that came with the HBI-F900 digitizer/imposer.
So in that respect we are now fully complete on all that came with the machine/imposer module plus all that came with the Easy Telopper II cartridge.

I tested the cartridge/disks on my Mitsubishi ML-G30. As I have two cartridges now, I tested both and the results are the same.
If you try the program disk WITH NO cartridge, it complains the cartridge is missing. So yes, the Easy Telopper II software does require the cartridge. Now what I noticed is when you boot from the disk, the AUTOEXEC.BAT calls two programs: V and EASY.
V is just something to format a RAMDISK. On the ML-G30 it showed that a 64KB RAMDRIVE would be created vs 192KB when booting on the HB-F900. So my take is, it will get whatever RAM the system has and use TOTAL-64K. As the ML-G30 has 128K I get 64K RAMDRIVE. The F900 has 256K so I get 192K. I will test later on another machine I have that had the memory expanded (I think my WSX has 512K but have to turn it on LOL).
EASY is the actual Easy Telopper II software and it does show on the screen. It has a 24 pixel Kanji font built-in so you can write all the nice Kanjis in like a much higher resolution and actually looks decent on the screen.
I need the manual so I can understand how the software actually works as it is a bit confusing. But that said, it seems that everything is working as expected, including my first Easy Telopper II cartridge.

Now I tried formatting a disk I had and just do a copy *.* from the A: to B: (swapping disks). Even though it copied and I can boot, the copy does not work like the original (it says I have no RAM DISK when using the copy) so there has to be something. The second disk it seems to be a tool to create data disks (so you can store the files you create) or a copy of the system disk. I will try that and see what happens.

If I want to make DSKs from ALL disks, using LINUX, how can I do that? I remember using DD with the USB drive I use with the Rookie Drive cartridge and it worked to create real floppies from DSKs. Now I want to do the opposite. What can I do on Linux guys? If needed I can use my Surface Pro with Windows 11 and run some Windows app (or use my son's Windows 10 PC) to copy the disks. In this case which Windows app do I need?

I will scan the labels on the floppies and then make copies with the labels for anyone that needs these.

Thanks!

CR

cat /dev/fd0 > disk.dsk

or use dd if=/dev/fd0 of=disk.dsk