HP Forums

Hi all.

As often happens to me, reading one of the most recent Forum post (guess which one...)

reminded me to share a little exprience of mine with you.

Even if this Forum is devoted mainly to vintage HP calc, my story is about the 50G - sorry :)

Frankly speaking, it has already been posted on comp.sys.hp48, but I hoped it might be

interesting here as well....

FOREWORD

As a contributor to the HP calculators forum (http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/categoryhome.do?categoryId=408),

I thought it would be fine to get (“automatically” and straight away from the emulator) the

list of keystrokes on the 50G when trying to reproduce an issue or suggesting a solution….

So, I needed a keystroke recording program for the 50G and found this one 

on hpcalc.org: 

http://www.hpcalc.org/hp49/utils/misc/krec11.zip 

The program, unfortunately, does not "run in the background" (as macro

recording on Excel does...) - I mean: it records the keystrokes but in the meanwhile

does not let the calc do what the keystrokes are intended to. 

Ideally, I liked to: 

1. start the keylogging program - running in background 

2. do whatever I like on the calc 

3. stop the keylogging progam 

4. get a log file with the keystrokes 

Then, on comp.sys.hp48, John Gustaf Stebbins pointed me to his own program on hpcalc.org:

http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=6493

but, in the meanwhile, as I had not been able to retrieve Stebbins' software by myself,

I had gone the "dumb" way, by doing the following: 

>>> on the 50G emulator bundled into Debug4x package (by William G. Graves - www.debug4x.com), I used the

Tools--->Macro---> Record

feature;

>>> this left me with a .MAC file, which I was able to convert to plain text by using the

Mac2txt.exe utility which comes with the above emulator;

>>> afterwards, on Cristoph Giesselink's homepage, I downloaded the latest version

of KML (Keyboard Mapping Language) documentation: 

http://privat.swol.de/ChristophGiesselink/Emu48/kml20r13.zip 

where I could find the "OutIn codes” for the HP49G keyboard.

They were helpful to understand how to translate entries on the text files like

"P 3 1"

into

"press [0]" 

>>> I arranged an Excel file with one column filled by all the OutIn codes, and aside each

single substitution to be made, written in a "comprehensible and descriptive" language

(like the "press [0]" above);

>>> I got a shareware (RQ Search and Replace v. 1.72-2 by Andrew Shelkovenko) to

make multiple search-and-replace operations on a file (I couldn't imagine it was so difficult

to find a suitable one - or I was not so smart in the quest :/  ) - I needed one that could

"learn" the search-and-replace pairs from a file (the .xls file I had already set up) 

>>> eventually, the steps I could perform were: 

   1. record a macro on the 50G emulator 

   2. convert the .mac file to a .txt file 

   3. feed the RQ Search and Replace program with the .txt file 

   4. get a file with all the keypresses translated into "descriptive" language. 

I just liked to share this with the Forum – maybe some of you were not too bored by my story  :-)

And maybe somebody could point me to a "friendlier" program to perform multiple search-and-replace, or to a brand new and more efficient method to achieve my goal... 

Any feedback will be appreciated. 

Best regards. 

Giancarlo