Connecting an HP41CX to a PC monitor

[Theo Kastrissios]

Does anyone know if it's possible to connect an HP41C/CX to the serial port of a PC monitor, thereby using the monitor to view printed output instead of the dedicated HP41C/CV/CX printer ?

[Andrés C. Rodríguez (Argentina)]

If you mean a DATA monitor, you need any terminal (communications) software on the PC, to look at serial port data.

If you are thinking about a VIDEO (CRT) Monitor, please see that the monitors have NO serial ports (the VGA connector is a 15 pin connector the size of a DB-9 format, which may look similar to a serial port).

Current monitors use frequencies not ever dream of in HP41 times, I think you should try to obtain a HP IL video adapter, connected to a standard, NTSC monitor (those with a RCA composite video input).

Please see the documentation coming with such HP IL video adapters, to ensure you are using the proper monitor and cable!

[Christof (Davis, CA)]

I suppose it is possible that, if you found an old serial terminal, you could write something that would work, if you had a module that would output rs232 serial. (or rs422 for some old terminals).

Far easier, I think (if you are have a serial output available) is to use soemthing like minicom in *nix to view the serial port data. Not sure how readable it would be, but it's definitely hackable. tip is a bit less powerful than minicom, it may not work as well.

-Christof

[Ellis Easley]

I agree that the only "easy" way to connect to the 41 is HPIL and there is (actually, are two versions of) HPIL adapter that display on a composite monitor. Now I'm not sure whether the 41 supports this next thing, but the 71 and the 75 have a "printer is" command that lets you direct printer output to another device, including the HPIL video adapter - which has a memory bigger than one screen in size, through which you can scroll.

[Christoph Klug]

Best solution is working with the HP-IL/PC Interface Card and belonging software TRANS41. This configuration runs nice on modern PC´s (also with special software tool under WIN2000) but your motherboard make availlable an 16 bit ISA-slot. Some modern motherboards have one or two ISA-slots or special add on expansion boards exist (for example for the HP vectra PC´s). This solution gives you some advanced features - much more than only poor output to a video screen : printing, emualtion of a mass storage device (a virtual IL-Disc-Drive), data transfer to a DOS file and last not least exchange with HP-41 emulator software like EMU41 or V41. For all this applications proved software solutions exist. The HP-IL/PC Interface Card is availlable from me as a rebuild version of the HP82973A interface card.