How many of you like HP41C calculators?

From: Holger Veit <holger.veit_at_ais.fhg.de>
Date: Mon Nov 17 10:58:52 2003

On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 08:47:10AM -0500, Joe wrote:
> At 09:18 AM 11/17/03 +0100, you wrote:
>
> >
> >As you surely know from the HP museum forum, there is support for HPIL
> through
> >the PC HP-IL card (which is ISA unfortunately),
>
> Except that it doesn't have the low level commands that are available
> with the calculator versions.

Huh? This card does have the orignal and plain HP-IL chip that has also been
built into the 82160 HP41 HP-IL module and the 82166 IL converter, so it *can*
do pretty much exactly the same as the HP-41 (with EXTIO or HPILDEV module,
of course). Noone really needs to rely on a lousy DOS driver that provides
almost no funcitonality.

> One of the problems with it was that you need
> a slow computer to run it. I've had a lot of people contact me looking for

This infact is a real problem with this stone-old card (which is why I said
"ISA unfortunately").

> source code or intenal documentaion for it so that they could rewrite the
> drivers to get around the speed problem and/or to run it under Linux. Does
> anyone know if they've ever had any success?

The docs on this chip and programming specs and IL docs were at www.hp41.org
the last time I looked there. So it is basically a matter of finding out the
IO addresses that the board uses. IDA is your friend on such a small driver.

> but I do agree for HP-IL,
> >the original system is still the first choice.
>
> The HP-71 is probably the best IL controller ever made but I just didn't
> warm up to it they way that I did the HP-41.

As I said, they all used the same hardware when it comes to the IL chip; it
was just that a barebone HP-41 with IL module didn't provide complete
access to the hardware (not even to reprogram the IL converter registers).

Eventually I opened the 82160 case and soldered the PCB of an EXTIO module
into it, and got everything I needed.

Holger
Received on Mon Nov 17 2003 - 10:58:52 GMT