Wagner,

>GWBASIC or QBASIC or even Compiled Basic still in operation

As I hear so very little about BASIC these days and I jumped straight
from it to ASM many years ago, I assumed that most others were using
more "fashionable" HLL's such as C, C++, VB etc.  Perhaps it's just the
condescending company I keep. You know how it is, boys and their
new flash toys. I still use my Commodore 64 too, bought for a small
fortune in 1983, even on current projects. With such a versatile User
Port (2 x 6526 CIA's) it works very well as a great big microcontroller.
It's almost like things have come full circle in that regard. There was
a time when I came in for much derision for using it, when others
were moving on to PCs. I never found XT's that friendly though and
stuck with the C64. Now that uC's are flavour of the month, I'm glad
I did.

> Explain better (to my email) your data composition and probably I can
> help you in some way.

The PIC organises collection of the original data and drives CE2, WE and
the address clock and reset for the SRAMs (4 x 128kB). The 8 bit data
from the SRAM goes into a 74HC157 (quad 2-input multiplexer), the 4 o/ps
of which go to the LPT status i/p lines. D0 of LPT is the nybble select. So,
two 4-bit nybbles are read into the PC and compiled back into the original
data byte (variable called DT) and then written to the drive with
PRINT#1,DT. I'm doing it this way until I find out how to turn on enhanced
parallel mode in BASIC (if possible, hint hint) to take the 8 bits in
directly. On a 233 the current method takes around 90 seconds, which is
acceptable, and I think pretty good for a very simple BASIC program.

How the data is getting in could be immaterial. What I need is either
to be able to save a hex value (ie one byte) rather than an ASCII string,
which is what is puffing up the size of the file. I had a look at the link
to file types at www.wotsit.org that Keith Causey posted a couple of days
ago but no joy. I'm sure I can't write a single byte to the HDD from
BASIC using WRITE or PRINT. It'll have to be some sort of memory
dump or file conversion program.

> ps:  Don't send posts to PICLIST using HTML = Yes at your browser...

Done. My apologies

Jinx