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brouhaha · (This post was last modified: 10-06-2022 11:37 PM by brouhaha.)

After the recent HHC conference, when I felt motivated to do some calculator hacking, I realized that since my move from San Jose to Denver in 2012, I've done almost no work on Nonpareil. That was never my conscious intention, and I didn't give it a lot of thought until now. It was never my conscious intention to abandon it; the move and job changes just changed my life so much that it got lost in the shuffle.

As a result of neglect, "bit rot" has set in. I did a tiny amount of work on a few dates between 2014 and 2018, which were never released. I was surprised to discover that I now couldn't even build Nonpareil rom source code on a current Linux system. The primary issues are related to much newer versions of SCons (the build system I use) and Python.

I've migrated the source code repository to Github and fixed the build issues so that it will build with SCons 4.4.0 and Python 3.10. I've merged the 2014-2018 changes, cleaned up a few things slightly, and ripped a bunch of stuff out of the build system where I was abusing SCons in ways its developers did not intend. I've added partially reverse-engineered HP-91 ROM source code. (I don't yet have the HP-91 actually working.)

I'm not promising that I'll do a whole lot of upgrades or maintenance, but I'm going to try not to let it bit rot for years again. Some of the things I hope to work on are supporting the HP-01 and HP-91.

For people just wanting a convenient simulator to use, the ones from Panamatik, Teenix, and Mike T. are probably a better choice than Nonpareil. Nonpareil is more of an ongoing research project.

Speaking of this being a research project, one of the things I'm looking into is that it appears that the HP-67 and -97 have three data storage registers in the hardware that are UNUSED! I haven't yet convinced myself 100%, but I can't find anything in the ROM that accesses registers at hardware addresses 0x3a through 0x3c. It seems that they could have made them available as user storage registers, allowing for 29 total instead of 26. Of course, they'd only be indirectly addressable.