Re: HP-41 > USB printer simulation (82143A) Message #26 Posted by Diego Diaz on 17 Feb 2012, 6:38 p.m., in response to message #25 by Christoph Giesselink
Wow!
Must admit that I feel a bit overwhelmed by the quality, diversity and *amount* of your responses: Thank you all! :-)
As I said before I know I have a lot of work ahead but it start to seem pretty clear that I cannot face the task of satisfying all the possible platforms and/or environments.
Moreover, it will take me months (may be years) to get the required expertise in some of the propossed developing tools, to build a "reasonably acceptable" and functional interface.
As it seems that some of you (most all of you) has already got said expertise in one or several of these development/programming languages. And since the 82143A intereface implemented in my HP-41>USB device is *sooo* simple. I think I'd better publish the very few lines required to handle the data reception (remember it's unidirectional) and its presentation. So anyone interested can write a suitable GUI on his/her favourite environment (and hopefully share it with the rest of us).
I'll still have to debug a few things but probably the final release will go "out of the box" with a (hated by most) VB GUI. Well, although not expert in this either, I have some previous experience from the ClonixConfig, and since most of the potential users already have Clonix/NoV's... :-/
BTW the USB interface cable is built with the same chip (Prologic) as the one in the USB programmer for the Clonix/NoV family, so previous users of any of these modules won't require new drivers installation.
Just to point it out, this small gadget is not pretended for replacing the 82143A, basically it's just a tool for saving some paper, *much time*: it tooks 43 seconds to list the complete "PRPLOT" program (340 lines) and the need for the physical (and somehow bulky) printer. Also useful with HEPAX DISASM dumps! In fact it was this point which makes me think in this approach... the text box has been sized to accept the complete disassembled listing of a whole 4K page. ;-)
Of course it does not handle the "graphical" features of the 82143A, and I'm still working in the possibility of implementing the TRACE mode (only MANUAL mode for now), mostly due to CAT listings, (any interest?)
The character set of the 82143A is sort of a nightmare, I've done my best in replacing the most weird characters with the better looking from the UTF-8 set. A look-up table is in charge of replacing the 7 bit code with its "equivalent" unicode.
Again my wholehearted thaks for the "massive" and positive response, and my apologies for not satifiying many of your expectations.
All the best from Dominican Republic.
Diego.
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