HP97 The journey begins

[teenix]

Hi all,

Getting there slowly. I've put together the code to access any of the 100 notes stored in memory and enabled each of the three available printers (97, 82240 and PC sim) to print a selected message.

These notes were displayed on LED displays for the 65 and 67 CPU boards, but they will only be printed on the 97. This is because the 97 printer has many more characters than can be displayed in 7 segment LED format, and because of the complexity of the 97 printer firmware/hardware, the 97 will halt operations while printing a note, then continue.

The notes are accessed in a similar way as the 65/67 CPU boards but you have to press [f][f] then either [A] or [B] to get the message to print.

If you press [f][f][A], the printer will print the current date/time from the battery backed clock.
If you press [f][f][B], the note number (0-99) is printed determined by the value in the C register. Afterwards, the C register is incremented by 1.

The key sequence [f][f][A or B] can be stored in program memory and onto magnetic cards and are compatible with the 67 CPU board, but if the 67 reads these from a 97 card, it will print the selected note on the LED display and either execute an R/S or a PAUSE.

If the 97 is operating in 97S mode, you can perhaps do the run from [A] feature, and this program might print the date/time then a text line, something like...'Weight in KG' then the value returned from the 97S interface.

I still have to get the code working that is responsible for monitoring the HP CPU code flow to intercept and process the messages.

cheers

Tony