I would like to see screenshots of the HP-15C LE Emulator. Can someone upload photos?

Torsten

There's nothing to see. It looks exactly like the 15C. Find a picture of the 15C, and you'll have a screen shot of the emulator. In fact, you can just R-click the logo and hide the title bar so all you see is the calculator.

Edited: 13 Sept 2011, 2:04 p.m.

No additional functions like saving/loading programs etc.?

Not that I can find (unfortunately).

Does it run at fastest possible speed? TIA.

As far as I can tell it runs at the processor speed, effectively instantaneous.

I would say not. I compared it against the WP34S emulator and programmed both to do a 100,000 DSE loop. I wrote the programs the same way on both machines not using any of the tricks of the WP34S. The 15C took approx. 5 seconds to complete while the WP34S took under a second.

I don't know how the emulator is implemented but a 100,000 count on a 1.6GHz Intel processor should be nearly instantaneous.

There are also a couple of bugs in the emulator itself. Not the HP-15C if you get my drift. Refreshing the window is broken in some situations and I saw screen artifacts while keying in my short test program. For example, those that have it installed can try this: Go into program mode and press the f key. You will see an image of the top row of keys on the emulator screen (at least I did).

Cheers,

-Marwan

Edited: 13 Sept 2011, 3:08 p.m.

Hmmmmm..... Interesting. Your results seem utterly different from mine.

Then there's still room for other simulators/emulators which offer these functions.
I doubted whether it is worthwhile to continue with my HP-15C simulator.

Edited: 13 Sept 2011, 3:11 p.m.

WP34s is expected to run faster because it runs native C++ code. Emulators are noticeably slower. Compare, for instance, Free42 with Emu42.

Cheers,

Gerson.

Thanks! This is a slightly newer version of the first two that I had!

Namir

Torsten, if you go the way of Free42 (maybe even sharing some code) your simulator may well be distinctive enough.

I agree. Which is why I commented on the emulator implementation. As another benchmark I just tried the same sort of loop on EMU48 running a 48SX and, for what it's worth, the timing was very close to that of the HP15C LE emulator.

Still, keep in mind that the WP34S is still being emulated. What you have with the 15C is an emulator running an emulator running your code while with the WP34S it is an emulator running your code. So an extra layer of emulation which, again, is why the emulator layer becomes so important.

I am not sure that your example of Free42 vs. Emu42 is valid since Free42 is presumably running native code on whatever hardware platform it is running on while WP34S is still being emulated.

However, the extra layer of emulation could indeed be the culprit here.

Cheers,

-Marwan

Edited: 13 Sept 2011, 4:01 p.m.

On Windows, there is no emulation layer in WP 34S and only one in the 15C LE. Both run native code compiled for the x86 architecture. In the case of the 15C, this native code runs a NUT CPU which executes the original 15 C firmware. In the case of WP 34S there is no such layer. It's just an ordinary Windows program.

We call it "emulator" because it pretends to be the real calculator without being it but not in the sense of trying to mimic the internals of the ARM processor.

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for that clarification. I assumed that the WP34S running under Windows was emulating the ARM processor and I made the same assumption for the HP12C. So one layer of emulation removed from each and I assume that this would place the WP34S at the same "emulation" level as Free42.

I guess that I would call both WP34S and Free42 simulators per some of the posters in this thread. Obviously this is not universally accepted.

Thanks again,

-Marwan

Edited: 13 Sept 2011, 4:33 p.m.

We had this discussion already. We emulate (simulate?, pretend?) the outer appearance of the calculator on the screen (which is a software totally separate from the code that runs inside the hardware). The calculator guts themselves are compiled from the very same sources that are used to build the ROM image. It's just a different target.

Makes sense. Like I said. Peoples opinions differ. I just made an assumption, based on the term "emulator", that was wrong.

Source code is available under the GPL. Check out the download link.