17 Nov
2003
17 Nov
'03
2:58 a.m.
On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 08:47:10AM -0500, Joe wrote:
At 09:18 AM 11/17/03 +0100, you wrote:
Huh? This card does have the orignal and plain HP-IL chip that has also been
built into the 82160 HP41 HP-IL module and the 82166 IL converter, so it *can*
do pretty much exactly the same as the HP-41 (with EXTIO or HPILDEV module,
of course). Noone really needs to rely on a lousy DOS driver that provides
almost no funcitonality.
As you surely know from the HP museum forum, there is support for HPIL
through
the PC HP-IL card (which is ISA unfortunately),
Except that it doesn't have the low level commands that are available
with the calculator versions. One of the problems
with it was that you need
a slow computer to run it. I've had a lot of people contact me looking for
This infact is a real problem with this stone-old card (which is why I said
"ISA unfortunately").
source code or intenal documentaion for it so that
they could rewrite the
drivers to get around the speed problem and/or to run it under Linux. Does
anyone know if they've ever had any success?
The docs on this chip and programming specs and IL docs were at www.hp41.org
the last time I looked there. So it is basically a matter of finding out the
IO addresses that the board uses. IDA is your friend on such a small driver.
but I do agree for HP-IL,
As I said, they all used the same hardware when it comes to the IL chip; it
was just that a barebone HP-41 with IL module didn't provide complete
access to the hardware (not even to reprogram the IL converter registers).
Eventually I opened the 82160 case and soldered the PCB of an EXTIO module
into it, and got everything I needed.
Holger
the original system is still the first choice.
The HP-71 is probably the best IL controller ever made but I just didn't
warm up to it they way that I did the HP-41.