HP-71B Dice Games

[Howard Owen]

Hello everyone,

I've been out of circulation for a while, but I've recently revived my interest in vintage HP calculators, particularly the HP-41C and the HP-71B. I dusted off my old YATZ71 dice program for the 71B, and packaged it up with a version of High Rollers I wrote. I wrote both of these back in 2005, but I'm announcing the latter program here for the first time. These aren't earth shaking applications, but I had fun writing them, and actually enjoy playing them on my 71. Feedback here or to hbo@egbok.com would be welcome.

A zip file containing text listings, documentation and a LIF image are at http://retrocalculator.com/HP71-Dice-Games-1.2.zip

Enjoy!

Howard

[Christoph Giesselink]

It's nice to see that there are people interested into these old calculators. I read your article on your homepage about the 71B and your idea writing assembly language programs for this calculators.

You thought about using "areuh" as Saturn assembler.

Let us go back into the dark history of Saturn assembly programming in the late 80'ies. HP hadn't published an assembler for the Saturn CPU until 1989. The first one from HP was HPTOOLS for DOS from Nathan Zelle. So before every developer had to make his own assembler with own mnemonics for the same CPU. When you're looking for example at old HP28S programs quite often the CLASS mnemonics are used. For me the CLASS mnemonics seem to be inspired by the MC68000 mnemonics.

So nowadays it only makes sense to use the "HP mnemonics", because the 71B IDS and all original HP documentation even for the later calculators use these mnemonics.

So my first choice would be the HPTOOLS with the SASM assembler and SLOAD linker. BTW, JFG used the DOS version of the HPTOOLS to recompile the JPC ROM.

I personally used the DOS HPTOOLS from the mid 90'ies until ~2000 for my HP48 development. Since then the HP49G got into my focus and with the old DOS HPTOOLS it wasn't possible to compile HP49G RAMMAP.A assembly file. So I switched to the HPTOOLS 3.0.x series for Win32. These versions of SASM and SLOAD are fully backwards compatible to the sources written for the DOS HPTOOLS. Another positive thing is, besides the sources and the Win32 binaries are available, there are also fully compiled HPTOOLS 3.0.x binaries for Linux and Mac OS.

So IMHO there's no need to search for a different assembler package than HPTOOLS 3.0.x. All documentation is also written in English so you don't need a language translation program and psychic abilities to understand the translation results. But perhaps you need the gift of second sight to read my "English" especially the grammar. ;-)

Any information about a tutorial writing LEX programs for the 71B and putting them into a LIF file on Win32 to load them on a calculator are welcome.

Best Regards,

Christoph

[Howard Owen]

Thanks for the informative reply, Christoph! Your English is completely intelligible to me. I've been a fan of your emulators for some time. You figured in my virtual 71B project. I loaded Hrast's HP-71X on emu48 on Windows in a virtual machine running on Linux. I can't recall if I added the HP-41C translator to 71X or not. It's been awhile :).

Quote:

---

Another positive thing is, besides the sources and the Win32 binaries are available, there are also fully compiled HPTOOLS 3.0.x binaries for Linux and Mac OS.

---

I had no idea. This point means I would never consider using anything else unless it had that kind of portability.

Quote:

---

All documentation is also written in English so you don't need a language translation program and psychic abilities to understand the translation results.

---

I read that now and laugh. JF helped me clean up the translation quite a lot and I was embarrassed by some of my errors. Fortunately I'm capable of laughing at myself :)

Quote:

---

But perhaps you need the gift of second sight to read my "English" especially the grammar. ;-)

---

As stated above, I have no problem at all understanding your English. :)

Quote:

---

Any information about a tutorial writing LEX programs for the 71B and putting them into a LIF file on Win32 to load them on a calculator are welcome.

---

I'm considering firing up the project to disassemble and extend the EXTFILES lex to cover the HP85 and 9000 file types. There's a lot I don't know that I will need to understand to accomplish that. I'm not worried though. The documentation exists and there are more than a couple of people here who understand the saturn pretty well :).

As to getting results onto a 71B, I'm currently using the ISA card on an old OmniBook 800CT running Windows 95. I plug in the ethernet cable (on a PCMCIA 10 mbit ethernet card) and scp the LIF image over using Cygwin. I think modern viruses might have trouble recognizing Windows 95, but I disconnect the ethernet anyway. :) Emu71 gets the image on to a 9114 floppy which I then read with my 71B. I can use the same path for the reverse direction too, but it's obviously awkward. I'm awaiting a PILbox, and I hope that will streamline the process. My ideal would be to drive the PILbox with a virtual machine running on my Mac, but I have a real Windows machine too in case that's no good.

Regards,
Howard

[Marcus von Cube, Germany]

Howard, my last tests with the PILbox in Parallels on the Mac (WinXP) were successful.

[Howard Owen]

Great! I'm using WinXP on Parallels
too.

Regards,
Howard

[Gene Wright]

Thanks Howard! Have to pull my trusty HP-71B out of the drawer now.

Suggestion..? Try to come to HHC 2011 this year in San Diego and consider writing up a short presentation about the HP 71b focusing on something you like or that might be interesting to some of us. You KNOW that most HP attendees present won't know anything about the 71B.

Be good to see you there again.

[Howard Owen]

I'd love to come to HHC 2011! I was there in 2007 and had a blast.