7 Dec
2007
7 Dec
'07
3:53 p.m.
I was going through some of my old literature and stumbled upon a
discussion of the HP250 architecture. One statement made was that it
was impossible for the customer to write his own binary executables
on this system. The idea being that the customer would program
everything in HP BASIC, I imagine.
Out of curiosity, was this restriction ever relaxed? How many people
Qute a number of HP machines could not be programmed in their native
machine code. HP Technical BASIC did not inclode PEEK and POKE, for
example...
In the case of the 9830, there was no way to get user machine code into
memory. You could load it from tape (but you couldn't write a machine
code tape file from the machine), you could run it from ROM.I suppose
some users maight have fiund ways to interface standard EPROMs to the
machine or write the tapes (it was a standard BMS format) on something else.
In the case of the HP41 calculator, it was physcially impossible to run
machine code from the machine's internal RAM. The processor was a pseudo
harvard architecture, RAM was organised in 56 bit 'registers' connected
to the SPU DATA line, ROM was in 10 bit words connected to the ISA line.
Some hackers found a way round this, making ROM emulator boxes (normally
called MLDL (Machine Language Development Lab) units).
I haev no idea whcih restriction applies to the HP250. IIRC it uses the
BPC processor hybrid (as in the HP9825), and I belive all ROM and RAM is
in the same address space on that chip. So presumably if you can get the
machine code into memoery and find some what to get the CPU to jump to
it, it will run.
have one of these in their collection?
I wish...
-tony