Final draft of MultiMod HP-71B ROM Emulator manual

[mfleming]

Quite a bit has gone into making a project meant for personal use into something that can be shared with and used by others. The image on the front page of the user manual shows one reason for the time taken. Dan Simpson has produced an excellent enclosure that makes it easy to insert or remove the emulator board. No need to have a gaping hole in the face of your HP-71B. Thank you Dan for making the enclosure possible.

Another effort has been to replace the Windows-based assembler and boot loader method of updating the ROM emulator with a platform independent serial monitor approach. All that is needed now is a USB to TTL serial cable and you're on your way to creating your own ROM arrangement. I think you'll agree this method is far simpler to use, and perhaps easier to understand.

There's still a bit of file collection and arrangement needed so that you have a full set of known ROM images to work with, but emulator boards and optional enclosures will be available in the next week or so. I'll mimic Monte Dalrymple's polished procurement process with order form, invoice, and shipping confirmation. Stay tuned for a formal announcement of offering.

I started this project a year ago to make ROMs available for my HP-71B, and now I hope you may find it useful for your own 71B.

~Mark

Edit: The final manual can now be found in the doc directory at
https://github.com/mafleming/HP71MultiMod

[Sylvain Cote]

Hello Mark,
I will review your document this week.
Sylvain
PS: Christoph Gießelink has several Virtual HP-IL peripherals for Windows.

[Massimo Gnerucci]

WOW, thank you.
Meanwhile I will read the fine manual.

[ThomasF]

Great work!

Looking forward to the actual hardware ... will do some reading before that!

Cheers,
Thomas

[J-F Garnier]

Hi Mark,

A couple of minor comments:

- you may better use the name "JPCF05" for the JPC ROM F05 file, instead of "JPC05" (several occurrences). The JPC ROM doesn't follow the HP way to name versions: "F" is the version and "05" is the revision (HP used a numeral for the version and a letter for the revision, such as MATH 1A).

- on page 7: correct "HP-IB" to "HP-IL" ( 3 occurrences).

Well done!

J-F