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Hi again,
I know that the HP42S is capable of infrarred
ouput to a printer, and I guess this should include program
listings. The question is, ¿ is there any freeware software
for pc/win98 which runs on a laptop with infrarred input
capability and is able to accept and store (in a text file
for instance) the output from the 42S ? That would be most
useful to print program listings on a large printer, or
else store the 42S programs on disk, and even to send them
to web sites for publication, among other uses.

It should be possible, I think. The question is finding said
software. Thanks in advance for any and all answers.

Yeah, I have code to do this.

I'll have a look at what needs to be done to it to make it reasonably easy to operate it and I'll release it an maybe a week.

It requires a suitably configured PC (nothing at all exotic) and you have to make a small hardware device that will cost you less than a new set of batteries for your HP42 :-)

It's been a quite few years now, but I used my 17BII to "print" to an old 386SX (see, I told you it was quite a few years ago), using the simple IR detector circuit & DOS "hpread.exe" program found here:

http://www.hpcalc.org/search.php?query=hpread

Matt

There is also another considerable option.

If an HP48 (S/SX/G/GX) is available and can be connected to the PC, INPRT (a program to the 48 family) is available to do what you want to. This way, anything that is sent to the IR printer will be 'printed' into an HP48 file. The resulting string containing the ´printed´ characters will be placed in level 2, as a control '0' or '1' will be at level 1.

INPRT is easy to find at

http://www.hpcalc.org/

It´s necessary to search for it. If you don´t find INPRT, send me an e-mail and I will send you a copy.

Best regards

Steve wrote:
> It requires a suitably configured PC (nothing at all
exotic) and you have to make a small hardware device that
will cost you less than
a new set of batteries for your HP42 :-)

Thanks for your answer, but why is any hardware
necessary, small or large ? My laptop already does have
an infrared input/output port, so that would be adequate,
wouldn't it ?

The infrarred port in your computer is connected to a serial-like interface, standarized as IRDA, which is prepared to accept data in a format different from the HP proprietary format for printing, defined around 1987. That is why the IRDA interfaces present on many current laptops, and also on some PDA or desktop computers cannot receive the HP calculator data stream.