Hi all.
As often happens to me, reading one of the most recent Forum post (guess which one...)
reminded me to share a little exprience of mine with you.
Even if this Forum is devoted mainly to vintage HP calc, my story is about the 50G - sorry :)
Frankly speaking, it has already been posted on comp.sys.hp48, but I hoped it might be
interesting here as well....
FOREWORD
As a contributor to the HP calculators forum (http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/categoryhome.do?categoryId=408),
I thought it would be fine to get (“automatically” and straight away from the emulator) the
list of keystrokes on the 50G when trying to reproduce an issue or suggesting a solution….
So, I needed a keystroke recording program for the 50G and found this one
on hpcalc.org:
http://www.hpcalc.org/hp49/utils/misc/krec11.zip
The program, unfortunately, does not "run in the background" (as macro
recording on Excel does...) - I mean: it records the keystrokes but in the meanwhile
does not let the calc do what the keystrokes are intended to.
Ideally, I liked to:
1. start the keylogging program - running in background
2. do whatever I like on the calc
3. stop the keylogging progam
4. get a log file with the keystrokes
Then, on comp.sys.hp48, John Gustaf Stebbins pointed me to his own program on hpcalc.org:
http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=6493
but, in the meanwhile, as I had not been able to retrieve Stebbins' software by myself,
I had gone the "dumb" way, by doing the following:
>>> on the 50G emulator bundled into Debug4x package (by William G. Graves - www.debug4x.com), I used the
Tools--->Macro---> Record
feature;
>>> this left me with a .MAC file, which I was able to convert to plain text by using the
Mac2txt.exe utility which comes with the above emulator;
>>> afterwards, on Cristoph Giesselink's homepage, I downloaded the latest version
of KML (Keyboard Mapping Language) documentation:
http://privat.swol.de/ChristophGiesselink/Emu48/kml20r13.zip
where I could find the "OutIn codes” for the HP49G keyboard.
They were helpful to understand how to translate entries on the text files like
"P 3 1"
into
"press [0]"
>>> I arranged an Excel file with one column filled by all the OutIn codes, and aside each
single substitution to be made, written in a "comprehensible and descriptive" language
(like the "press [0]" above);
>>> I got a shareware (RQ Search and Replace v. 1.72-2 by Andrew Shelkovenko) to
make multiple search-and-replace operations on a file (I couldn't imagine it was so difficult
to find a suitable one - or I was not so smart in the quest :/ ) - I needed one that could
"learn" the search-and-replace pairs from a file (the .xls file I had already set up)
>>> eventually, the steps I could perform were:
1. record a macro on the 50G emulator
2. convert the .mac file to a .txt file
3. feed the RQ Search and Replace program with the .txt file
4. get a file with all the keypresses translated into "descriptive" language.
I just liked to share this with the Forum – maybe some of you were not too bored by my story :-)
And maybe somebody could point me to a "friendlier" program to perform multiple search-and-replace, or to a brand new and more efficient method to achieve my goal...
Any feedback will be appreciated.
Best regards.
Giancarlo
Go back to the main exhibit hall