Re: HP Prime has [optional wireless] [CORRECTED] Message #15 Posted by bhtooefr on 23 Apr 2013, 1:00 p.m., in response to message #14 by Chris Smith
Nice thing about a 50g repurposing project is, the hardware already exists, it's perfectly capable of being a fully-featured RPL calc (by virtue of... already being the most fully-featured RPL calc), and it's already labeled as a scientific machine (so key legends don't need to be changed).
The trick would be keeping the features constrained to something sane, while avoiding a decrease in functionality, I'd think. And, if possible, it might be best to see if the SysRPL code that's already in the 50g's OS could be open sourced (if not, then there's always having a script download the 2.15 firmware, and then "patch" it (which would actually be, take out the relevant SysRPL bits, and drop them into a new firmware), but that's a royal pain) to reduce development effort.
And, there would also be the concerns about changing hardware - as I understand, just changing framebuffer size can break a lot of stuff (but is that breaking things for UserRPL code, or just SysRPL and asm?) Really, it's 2013, you'd want a way to get resolution independence of some kind, even if it's the Acorn/Sony/Palm/Microsoft/Apple hokey pixel quadrupling scheme (although, that's kinda ugly (and by kinda ugly, I mean really ugly) for 131x80 plus annunciators - 393x240 on a 2.7" Sharp Memory LCD could work, but then you'd have to move annunciators to the left side, and they'd be tiny. The other thing is, switch to using an impossibly high resolution internal graphics representation, and just use scaling factors to get the real resolution of the screen. Problem is integer scaling to all sorts of disparate modes, and floating point scaling (especially on 1bpp displays) gets really ugly really quickly.
There is also, just maintaining UserRPL compatibility, and being SysRPL-like under the hood, but not actually compatible. For most users, I'd think that'd be fine? Floating point scale grobs to fit, and to hell with everything else?
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