HP35s Program Memory Quirk



#47

I've just been documenting/scrolling through my HP35s's program memory. I have the machine set for 100 data memories, and have about 150ish lines of code in it under about 15 different labels.

When scrolling through 'line count' program memory
[via the <-MEM 2] menu, downward, I will find a LBL ; that the list seems to be stuck at. Repeated attempts to scroll down past this label has no result - the LBL ; continues to be displayed.

Keying <-SHOW displays a checksum of 1C5A for this strange label.

Scrolling up through the program list can proceed with no ill effects.

Scrolling down again will again hit this strange LBL ; [with the same resultant checksum].

Has anyone else experienced this?

Thanks,
TomC

ps: BTW, this is a relatively early HP35s [CNA72103302].

pps:Also, (FWIW) my first line in PRGM memory is an unlabelled GTO X001 - this gives me a quick 'GTO . . R/S' which displays owner information.


#48

...so, I take it no one else has seen this?

TomC


#49

IMO no one here uses/plays with their 35s anymore. To me it's a dead machine and mine gathers dust somewhere...


#50

IMO no one here uses/plays with their 35s anymore. To me it's a dead machine and mine gathers dust somewhere...
I DONT AGREE WITH THAT, USING MINE PAST 3 YRS TO SOLVE COORDINATE PROBLEMS AND NO GLITCHES TO DATE, SAVES WEAR AND TEAR ON MY 42S


#51

Quote:
DONT AGREE WITH THAT, USING MINE PAST 3 YRS TO SOLVE COORDINATE PROBLEMS AND NO GLITCHES TO DATE, SAVES WEAR AND TEAR ON MY 42S
What is that you don't agree with? The fact that I have personal opinion clearly expressed by "IMO..." and "To me..."?
BTW in case you don't know, capital letters indicate shouting, was that your intention or you just accidentally turned CapsLock on?

#52

sorry about caps,but not about disagreeing,

#53

I guess it was that your opinion was making a statement about everyone else, which was shown to be incorrect with one reply.

So, have your opinion that no one is bald, but be prepared to have people disagree with it... particularly those who are bald!

If you had said "IMO, very few people..." or "IMO, I don't know why anyone..." then it would not have been quite as categorical.


#54

Thank you for the lesson, Gene. Now I'll find my 35s and start using it again even though it has heaps of bugs and unreliable keyboard.
BTW I'm not bald, just the opposite. Probably only clever men go bald. :)



Edited: 13 May 2009, 9:01 a.m.


#55

Now, now...

I did not say that the 35s was without problems or that there may be some (I don't know the percentage) who no longer use it for various reasons.

However, your original statement was too inclusive and disproven by the first response. :-)

And, I am the disproof that clever men go bald!

#56

Quote:
Probably only clever men go bald. :)

My wife says (soothingly) that grass doesn't grow on a busy street.

#57

Quote:
I don't agree with that, using mine past 3 yrs to solve coordinate problems and no glitches to date, saves wear and tear on my 42s [changed to lower case]

Are you two talking about the same machine? It looks to me like the 35s was announced in July 2007, so yours couldn't be 3 years old unless it's a pre-production unit.


#58

I bought the 35s as soon as it was available,so maybe 2 1/2 years

#59

My two daughters both have 35s's and they use them -- mostly to play games but still it is use.

I don't use it much but only because I've a 15c and 16c with me most of the time.


- Pauli


#60

What games are they playing on the 35s? Any links to ones?

thanks,
bruce


#61

This thread has the current one (yes, I wrote it). For some reason it is popular not only with my daughters but several of their friends at school. This has been submitted to the MoHPC software library but isn't there yet.

The other one they liked was nim, at least until they figured out how to win it...


- Pauli


#62

thanks, I hadn't seen that before. I am sure that my daughter will love it. Ok, I admit it, I'll enjoy it too.



--Tod

#63

Exactly my case. It is lying somewhere and when looking after it, there is still some strange behaviour.

Mine still refuses to do quick additions. It seems that my fingers are too fast for the key buffer / data input routine so that it hangs when keying data in.

HP, please allow me to express my opinion: the HP35s is the biggest piece of crap you produced in the last years.

#64

I like playing with mine, and I must say it is an attractive unit compared to its coyote ugly 33s predecessor.

But as a programming device it really just isn't practical. All of the that memory to harness, but no easy way to get programs into or out of the thing, just dogged key poking.

My favourite RPN programmable these days is Free42 on my Palm TX, and indeed it is the only reason I keep that handheld active. That will get retired when Thomas Okken finalizes the port for iPhone/iPod touch. i41CX+, which just keeps getting more powerful with each revision, is a close second.

Ease of I/O has made this hobby a lot more fun than it ever was for me, especially since discovering thing like hp41uc for converting programs between various formats. The aesthetically pleasing 35s is just too much of a step back.


#65

I imagine this series of calculators has never been intended to build more complex software libraries upon it. This was clear before the 33s. There was the chance to automate things when needed, but at the same time, the memory was quite limited. For more sophisticated things there was always a machine that allowed for saving and restoring programs.

I'd love the 35s, if it weren't affected by so many bugs, even without a card reader.

Edited: 26 May 2009, 7:53 a.m.


#66

Has HP already produced ALL of the hp 35s they are ever going to produce? If not, they probably would update the ROM, right? It would be the right thing to do. I don't want to start a petition pledging how many units I would purchase, but I would most likely pick up a few new 35s' if all of the bugs were removed.

Surely HP has already done the math on this quandary. Anyone know HP's official or unofficial posture on the bugs inside the hp 35s? The unofficial might be better reading..



PG


#67

A ROM update would depend on sales and the severity of the bugs.

Fixing the bugs and releasing a new ROM would be a fairly expensive exercise and there is no way to retro-fit the ROM to existing units.

- Pauli


#68

You know these things better than me, Pauli. OTOH, there has been some work on the 33s, which gives me some hope. Maybe HP consideres a new revision or even a 35sII ( with R<->P funcionality )in the future.


#69

Thomas,

What do you mean by this: ".. there has been some work on the 33s"?


#70

There was a redesign of the display due to a nearly unreadable decimal separator. The keypad has also been improved iirc.


#71

Even the Algebraic system was slightly tweaked after the first units. The swap function was changed--somewhere in the past I wrote about this.


#72

Oh, I see. This is exactly what I was trying to get at. So, in the recent past HP has updated a ROM prior to having more units manufactured. This is good news, for someone who is partial to the hp 35s (looks at reth).

Did HP let the public know the hp 33s was updated? How were you notified?

Finally, does anyone think the hp 35s would be more esteemed if many of the bugs on Paul Dale's list were fixed after the first production units sold out? (Perhaps the first production units have not sold out yet; I don't know).





ps - just kidding, Reth.


#73

Quote:
Finally, does anyone think the hp 35s would be more esteemed if many of the bugs on Paul Dale's list were fixed after the first production units sold out?

If the fixed bugs are the serious ones that can screw things badly, then yes. Losing memory, showing incorrect results, locking up and having to reset are serious. Going back and looking at the list, most of the bugs would rate serious in my book :-(


- Pauli

#74

There are at least three, and possibly even more, ROM versions of the 33S.

There was pre-production ROM, and an early production ROM ("Walmart 1st issue") and a Production ROM with R-->P bugs and H.MS bugs and others, with small comma and decimal.

Then IIRC there was new ROM to deal with the R-->P.

I can't remember when the period where fixed, but some of us pushed buttons through blister pack in Walmart to figure it out--I can't remember the results, my old emails to Craig Finseth are lost, I don't know that he put all the details on his site, and they might be buried in the museum archives.

Maybe Paul's comprehensive list caught all of my discoveries but it has been a while.

#75

Quote:
Finally, does anyone think the hp 35s would be more esteemed if many of the bugs on Paul Dale's list were fixed after the first production units sold out?
Yes. The 35s has had a warm welcome in this forum and raised high expectations. This calculator does not follow a new concept but is a descendant of the very popular 32S(II) and his ancestors (I deliberately leave out the 33S).

Furthermore, if a compact programmable non-graphing calculator is all you want, the 35s ist your only choice (if a Casio is out of discussion). This market ist quite limited and so is the assortment.


#76

Quote:
Furthermore, if a compact programmable non-graphing calculator is all you want, the 35s ist your only choice.

Not so! I much prefer the 33s over the 35s. The 33s is still readily available via Ebay, at a decent price, and its functions (especially operations with number bases) work great, and it is MUCH MUCH faster than the 35s. Sure, it doesn't have 800 registers and its use of labels is not optimal, but it a great little machine to program in pure RPN.


#77

Quote:
The 33s is still readily available via Ebay

I think it's still being manufactured. Every place that I've checked online still sells it and you can still buy it directly from HP.

#78

I hate my HP33S; haven't used it at all since I got my HP35S. I'd be happy to sell it without the batteries, which I removed to use in my HP35S when they wear out.

#79

In Don's post, he mentions the hp 33s is much faster than the hp 35s. I went and had a look at the N-Queens benchmarks article here at the museum, and noticed two listings for the hp 35s, one of which mentions "Turbo x1.5".

Does anyone have more information about this? I searched the archives to no avail.

Here is a link to the article: Article #700

And here are the entries for the hp 35s. (And yes, the hp 33s is faster than the hp 35s).

 -    4:17         HP-35S           Keystroke / RPN
- ...
- 2:49 HP-35S Keystroke / RPN / Turbo x1.5
- ...
- 2:11 HP-33S Keystroke / RPN

Thanks,

PG


#80

Pal --

Here is an archived post of mine comparing execution speeds for numerical integration between the HP-32SII, HP-33s, and HP-35s. At the end, you'll see that the HP-35s takes just more than twice as long as the HP-33s for the same problem, performed in the same manner. The timing-test results for my benchmark are virtually identical to those of Article #700.

I suspect that the short battery life of the HP-33s might have led to a power-saving slowdown for the HP-35s.

(BTW, the typo "HP-35SII" in the archived post should read, "HP-32SII".)

http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/archv017.cgi?read=124094#124094

-- KS

Edited: 30 May 2009, 12:40 a.m.


#81

Thank you, Karl. I read the archive your link leads to, and am about to follow the two links in that link. I might be done reading and following the rabbit hole called MoHPC forums by nine o'clock tonight.

#82

The 35S Turbo is the result of an experiment for the maximum possible speedup.
The speed can be changed by replacing the resistor R1 to 39kOhm, if I remember
correctly.
I assume a similar speedup is also possible with the33S, but I haven't
tried it, due to the disappointing result of the 35S.


#83

Thanks Xerxes, that's awesome. I was hoping for a software, Nintendo-like keyboard combo to throw my hp 35s into turbo mode. I think I'll pass on the hardware hack.

Cheers,

PG

#84

Quote:
This calculator does not follow a new concept but is a descendant of the very popular 32S(II) and his ancestors (I deliberately leave out the 33S).

Never having a 32SII or 33s the 35s was a bit foreign to me. I could not understand why it did things the way it did (e.g. difficult to use complex, alphanumeric line numbers).

I recently obtained a 32SII and now understand were the 35s inherited some of it deficiencies. I am not a fan of the 32SII. IMHO, RPN software design reached it's apex with the 42S.

#85

BTW I am lucky enough to have one of the early production units with the early Algebraic swap handling (and also all the bugs). I had an early one from Amazon too, but lost it!

Edited: 27 May 2009, 11:05 p.m.

#86

Clearing the variable space helped me once with a different (seemingly unrelated) problem, where I wasn't able to enter threedimensional vectors anymore (IIRC). No trouble since then.

My serial: CNA72102360

BTW @all, has there been a software update to the 35S?


#87

Curious - so the Calc is permanently damaged?

TomC

#88

Hi Thomas. Have you tried removing the unlabelled GTO X0001 to see if the problem clears?


Regards,

John


#89

John:

No, I have not. Sometimes the ';' issue isn't there when I go into/outof PRGM mode.

I'll experiment a bit more.

thanks,
TomC


#90

Thomas,
I have managed to re-create the problem. By creating 0001 GTO X001 at the PGM TOP and a small routine at LBL X to display info.
Each on it's own does not seem to produce the problem.

By the way, to the rest: I have not had problems keying in data (even practiced adding a shopping till slip several times - speeding up as I started memorising it). Perhaps I'm still too slow. I have a newer model, S/N: CNA 84902974. Although it does seem to have most of the bugs reported in Paul Dale's HP-35s bug list (article 735).

PS Paul, I keyed in the 710-line game. I take my hat off to you for doing it in the first two weeks of owning the 35s. It took me several hours just to key it in!! (well, perhaps I am just slow on the keyboard)


#91

Quote:
I have managed to re-create the problem. By creating 0001 GTO X001 at the PGM TOP and a small routine at LBL X to display info.
Each on it's own does not seem to produce the problem.

Added to the HP-35s bug list article.


Quote:
Paul, I keyed in the 710-line game. I take my hat off to you for doing it in the first two weeks of owning the 35s. It took me several hours just to key it in!! (well, perhaps I am just slow on the keyboard)

No you aren't slow on the keyboard, it really does takes a few hours. My daughters keyed it in over a few days in sessions. One of them managed to enlist some class mates to assist!


- Pauli


#92

Update to Thomas' quirk:

It seems to be the 35s' attempt of listing [using <- MEM 2] an unlabelled program.

All that is required is an unlabelled program (which of course has to occur directly after PRGM TOP otherwise it will automatically resume with the previous label's numbering).

When doing a program listing it will start at the first labelled entry and end with "LBL ;" and the "length" of the unlabelled program.

It also only seems to occur if the program counter is at PRGM TOP (e.g. after GTO.. ), in other cases it totally omits listing the unlabelled program.

What happens if the unlabelled program is the only program in memory? I don't know and I'm not prepared to wipe the memory to find out! :-) [Oh how we wish for a comms port]


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