Lotus 123

[Vorticon]

Hi. I recently purchased a supposedly complete Lotus 123 package for my PCjr, only to find out that the crucial Help & Utility disk is missing. I have contacted the seller, but I doubt he has it. The program will not run without this disk being in the drive...
Is there a way to run the program with just the cartridges (there are 2, one for each slot)?
Alternatively, is anyone here willing to make me a copy of the disk?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

--Walid

[Brutman]

I'll send you email shortly.

The diskette is helpful, but I did not remember that it was required. Lotus 1-2-3 should start without it.

(I'm still using 1-2-3 for my home spreadsheet needs 20 years later ... old habits die hard.)

[Trixter]

I tried to demo 1-2-3 on a stock PCjr this weekend and the utility/install/setup disk seemed to be missing some files thanks to the previous owner; install.bat couldn't find a few things, and the resulting copy+install responded with "Error loading driver" every time we tried to start it. We had more success on an expanded PCjr... until we could visually see the program was using CPU pages as generic ram and could "see" the program onscreen. Updating the screen (moving the cursor, etc.) actively corrupted the program until it crashed, something both disappointing and humorous.

I have a second copy of 1-2-3 and I'm hoping those disks are more pristine, such that I can use them to overwrite the previous-owner-mangled version.

[Vorticon]

The screen corruption happens with any DOS other than 2.1. I ran into that issue myself. Try booting with DOS 2.1 instead. One issue with that DOS version is that I can't get it to recognize drive C: (my IDE drive), which is a real bummer since I am then restricted to saving files on floppies... If you happen to have an IDE drive as well, would you mind checking if you can replicate that issue?

[Trixter]

Haven't tried with jrIDE yet, but I recall we were booting the stock system with 2.10. (Should we have used 2.11?) I'll try again when I have my jrIDE system set up.

I just checked the disks with my other 1-2-3 copy and they are identical... so now I'm really confused why INSTALL.BAT wouldn't work properly. IIRC it calls a program that is supposed to write an AUTOEXEC.000 and TMP.000 which then get concatenated into AUTOEXEC.BAT, but when I ran it those weren't created and I would see "0 files copied" as the COPY FILE1+FILE2 FILE3 operation failed. Then, trying to start 1-2-3 resulted in "Error loading driver".

[Vorticon]

While I don't get errors with the install.bat program on my system, I am still unable to run 1 2 3 using the Lotus command where I get a file not found error since no lotus.exe file is generated. There is a lotus.000 on the disk which locks my system up if I rename it lotus.exe and try to run it. On the other hand, typing 123 at the command line gets the program going, even though there is no 123.exe file on the disk, so I assume this executable resides on the carts?

[Trixter]

Yes, it's on the carts. Hooking the DOS command-line is one of the cooler things carts do; I wish I understood the mechanism. You run colorpaint and MYM the same way (ie. just type "mym" at the prompt and it starts no matter what disk is loaded).

So you get good files but no program, and I get bad files and no program. Argh. I'll investigate further when I have the jrIDE system up.