HP Forum Archive 15

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HP-71B and PC Message #1 Posted by Fabio Albonico on 20 Dec 2005, 6:26 a.m. Who can help me to connect HP71B with Pentium PC? Thank you

Re: HP-71B and PC Message #2 Posted by Tony Duell on 20 Dec 2005, 8:00 a.m., in response to message #1 by Fabio Albonico What hardware do you have, other than the HP71 and the PC? And what OS do you run on the PC? One way to do it is to use the HP82164 HPIL-RS232 interface, along with the HPIL module in the HP71. I've written programs for linux to transfer files between a PC and an HP71 with that interface.

Re: HP-71B and PC Message #3 Posted by Christoph Klug on 20 Dec 2005, 2:29 p.m., in response to message #2 by Tony Duell A second solution would be using EMU71 in combination with the HP-IL/PC Interface Card. This solution needs a PC motherboard which includes a ISA-Bus... Regards - Christoph Klug

Re: HP-71B and PC Message #4 Posted by Howard Owen on 20 Dec 2005, 3:45 p.m., in response to message #3 by Christoph Klug I actually find EMU41 to be more useful in talking to my 71Bs. EMU71 can't operate as a non-controller. You can still use a real 71B with EMU71, but you have to drive from EMU71. EMU41 on the other hand will stop emulating a 41C on the loop and get out of the way when it sees another controller. That lets you use the 32-column wide EMU41 display as a DISPLAY IS device on the real 71, while accessing all the emulated devices, such as disks and printers. A better solution if you want a remote terminal on the PC is HPILLINK, available on the museum FTP site. It will talk to your card, Cristoph, or to HP's, and provides both DISPLAY IS and KEYBOARD IS devices. (The latter requires the KEYBOARD lex file, or one of either the Forth/Assembler ROM or the 41C Translator ROM). It also lets you upload and download text files. I use it extensively when doing BASIC development on the 71. It lets you single step BASIC code from the emulated terminal, which is pretty cool. It's useful too because having several lines visible gives single-stepping better context. One annoyance is that the text files it uploads are given a ".TEX" externsion, which xemacs thinks is TeX source. So it highlights the BASIC text in weird ways, trying to interpret it as such. I just rename the file before loading it into the editor to get around that. My ideal emulation environment for speaking to a real 71 would be EMU71, running as a non-controller, providing keyboard and display emulation as well as the other essential pieces all in one place. I imagine that might be hard to do in DOS, however. My actual ideal would have all that running natively on Linux. But I shelved my Linux HP-IL device driver months ago when it started getting sticky. But as long as I'm wishing, I wish you could produce a PCI version of the card so the driver would be easier and my choice of systems to run it on less limited. Unfortunately, commodity PC hardware just doesn't have the longevity that these fine old HP machines do. At some point, getting a machine with an ISA slot may become as difficult as getting a rare calculator. 8)

Re: RS232 cabel Message #5 Posted by Christoph Klug on 20 Dec 2005, 2:33 p.m., in response to message #2 by Tony Duell Dear Tony, please give me the wiring details for creating a own RS232 interface cable connection bwetween PC = 9 pin and HP-IL/RS232 interface = 25 pin. With best regards from Germany - Christoph Klug

Re: RS232 cabel Message #6 Posted by Tony Duell on 24 Dec 2005, 5:17 a.m., in response to message #5 by Christoph Klug Ooops, I missed this... Download the LIF Utilities for Linux from the HPCC web site. The cable wirelists are in there, along with some other hardware stuff. It's in the hardware/ directory of that .tar.gz file, I think. You might also want to look at some of the comments in the source code. There's a bit of non-obvious HP calculator info there.

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