HP Forum Archive 19

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41 RCL MATH - 30 years later... Message #1 Posted by Ángel Martin on 18 Oct 2009, 6:51 a.m. Sunday News on the venerable 41 field, to somebody's surprise still happening these days... After wrestling for a while with the NEXT1 and NEXT2 MCODE routines I've added a couple of ideas to the SandMath module, which you could call " funtion launchers". The first one is HYP, a prefix-like function used to access the six hyperbolics functions on the module. It has a more logical keyboard layout, assigned to the SIGMA+ key it saves 5 key assignments, valuable to allocate other functions from the same rom to the keyboard. Hate it or love it, it works great and was great fun to programm. The second one is RCL#, an extension to the native RCL function that allows the arithmetic functions to be invoked from the keyboard in a convenient manner. It mimics the STO user interface, so you can key in +,-,*,/ and also supports IND addressing. Try it out for size... It's also a launcher in that it'll transfer the execution to one of the module's RCL_Math four functions, or to the mainframe RCL. Coming soon to a TOS near you... Edited: 18 Oct 2009, 7:54 a.m.

Re: 41 RCL MATH - 30 years later... Message #2 Posted by Vieira, Luiz C. (Brazil) on 18 Oct 2009, 3:48 p.m., in response to message #1 by Ángel Martin Hola, Ángel; ¿que tal? First of all, congratulations! Your HP41-addressed ROM´s are an actual inspiration to us, who like building our own stuff. Being more a 'hardware guy', I'm always tricked with SW development because I can not set hardware apart when seeing each code, so I cannot go ahead developing machine code without a good deal of knowledge about the hardware. Anyway, I´m not afraid of going ahead and trying my own HP41 ROM. I´ll get back with this subject later... For now, one request/suggestion: wouldn't you be interested on writing down your own experience (like the one you started this thread with) and compose a collection of HP-41 ROM 'how to'´s ? Either a complete text or a collection of directions, like the ones you have been posting here and some others you did not actually mentioned when facing and solving new problems. That would help a lot developing new code along with the many other literature. Something like an extended version of the notes you added in the module-s blueprints... c]8^) This way, anyone else creating their own ROM would contribute the same. This is just an idea, a suggestion. What you have already done is gold, my friend. Cheers. Luiz (Brazil)

Re: 41 RCL MATH - 30 years later... Message #3 Posted by Ángel Martin on 19 Oct 2009, 3:53 a.m., in response to message #2 by Vieira, Luiz C. (Brazil) Hi Luiz, glad you're interested in these enhancements... not many people left these days, I actually wonder about my sanity sometimes :) By all means go ahead and try your hand at your MCODE routines. It's kinda hard (not being a computer scientist but an old fashioned EE) but beware, it's very addictive. I'm not sure there's much of generic procedures to write up, just common sense programming practices and lots of trial & error. VASM listings are a must (I discovered it the hard way, i.e. by not having them) and using a good environment is vital (I'm still behind on that, somehow got used to the "blueprints", call it hand-made if you wish). There's a lot in those 12k called "mainframe ROMs", plus all the plug-ins and accesories. I just scratched the surface, nothing more than that - but lots of fun in the way. Will keep it up! Best wishes.

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