New - HP33C Simulator - BETA Message #1 Posted by Mike T. on 11 Apr 2005, 7:26 p.m.
OK - For those of you who allways wondered what it was like to use an old HP33C now is your chance to find out!!
It has been a long, long time in the making and may not be of interest to every one but Dave has very kindly placed a copy of a ZIP file containing my own HP33C simulator
here.
I started work on this a few years after my own HP33C died, and originally it was just intended to be a simple RPN calculator, written as introductory project to keep me interested while I learnt Visual BASIC - but I over the years I've kept on adding features and slowly refining it.
Numeric accuracy is about as good as I can make it given that it uses IEEE floating point underneath and though I'm thinking about writing my own BCD routines I think it is good enough for now, I've been using it for a couple of months and havn't noticed anything obvious - yet. I believe I have trapped all the error conditions properly but know that I have some work to do to handle numeric overflow correctly.
I did add a few 'enhancements' to the original, the backspace key deletes the last digit entered, and the insert key in program mode toggles an insert mode, allowing instructions to be inserted, renumbering GTOs and GSBs as needed.
To run the simulator extract the contents of the ZIP file to a folder and just double click on 'rpncalc33.exe', it will run on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2K, and Windows XP (but NOT Windows 95/98/Me) providing that the Visual BASIC 5.0 runtime is installed. The program saves it's state in an INI file in the same directory as itself and does not use the registry.
Eventually I intend to release this simulator under the GPL, if possible, but for now am only making the binary available (it did start life as a learning exercise for Visual BASIC, and I'm not really a programmer so I would like to tidy things up a bit more first - you will have to be patient).
Please treat this as a BETA release, for use entirely at your own risk.
Please post any feedback here.
Mike T.
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