A poll again, concerning the 43S (again)

[brouhaha]

(01-06-2015 03:51 PM)walter b Wrote:  But the close-to-hardware code has to be written from scratch AFAIK.

I wrote the close-to-hardware code (startup, power management, keyboard, LCD, sound, IR, mass storage) for the prototype units which presently run either 41 microcode or Free42. Much of that code should be usable for the 43s with only minor changes. Free42 has a fairly reasonable user interface API, and I wrote an interface layer between the Free42 C++ world (really mostly the C subset of C++) and the low-level hardware stuff.

The development units will be provided with Free42 as an example and as a test that the hardware works.

The Free42 code will be made available for anyone who wants it, but I do NOT recommend routine use of it on our hardware, as Free42 was designed for the (relatively speaking) near-infinite amount of memory available on desktop/laptop/smartphone/tablet systems, and not the very limited memory capacity of a handheld calculator. The result is that it's quite easy to get memory fragmentation problems when running Free42 on this hardware. In principle it should be possible to rewrite portions of Free42 for more suitable memory management, but it's a big task and one that I'm not personally willing to undertake. [Note that this is absolutely NOT intended as a criticism of Free42; it does an excellent job in the environments it was designed for, and I doubt that the author expected to ever see it on custom-build calculator hardware.]