Re: hp32sii rom (longer) Message #10 Posted by Christoph Giesselink on 24 June 2003, 4:53 p.m., in response to message #9 by Renato
If it would be a marketing piece the picture would be a fake and/or the pay button is missing. But why the pay button is missing? I haven't the rights to distribute any ROM images and to answer another question an extraction from a real calc isn't possible. An emulator without ROM images is useless and will only cause requests for ROM images on differents forums (ie. HP28C ROM images for the published Emu28).
It makes no difference if the calculators are in production or not. We should be glad that HP gratefully allowed us to make ROM images from our personal calculators to use them in emulators. Emulators never dammned by HP. So what about the ROM images that are available (list not complete): HP38, HP39, HP40, HP41, HP48, HP49. The following list is my personal opinion, be free to have your own one.
Let us begin with the oldest one
- HP41, paper ROM sources published under the NOMAS license, do this also allow publishing in binary form? I remember years ago it was difficult to find them on the internet.
- HP49, here it isn't very difficult because ROM update file contain most of the operating system and HP published his own emulator with a ROM image in a seperate file.
- HP39/40, officially only beta versions as emulator and HP49 update images had been available. AFAIK the one non beta which is published somewhere is the one I grabbed from my HP40G with an own written Aplet (sorry eLesson).
- HP48, members of ACO told us that HP48 images can be used freely in non commercial use. I never saw any license and I tried to get one from HP, no answer. This is the reason why I don't distribute any ROM images with Emu48.
- HP38, free interpretation of the the HP48 license, but here I know the case that somebody asked HP to put Emu48 and ROM images onto a book CD (the emulator wasn't the main topic on the CD). This was definitely forbidden by HP because of commercial use.
Another final words to the free available emulators Emu28, Emu42beta, Emu48. Some people think they can get all for free without any payback. Payback don't mean money in all cases. I personally also use free software, so my development on HP emulators is a sort of payback for there work. But in the last time I invested many of my free time on emulator development and that's the most important thing, much money to buy the original calculators, first to get a legal copy of the ROM image and 2nd without the original calculator the emulator development is very very difficult, even if you have some documents about the hardware (BTW, TNX to Paul Courbis for his picture of the HP28C memory layout). This is also one of the reasons why I don't publish a fully working non beta version of Emu42. 1st I hate questions for ROM images, 2nd I invested to much time and money to give it away for free.
Christoph
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