HP48GX Connectivity

[John W Kercheval]

I am an HP71B guy.

But I dusted off my 48GX over the weekend. 1MB RAM pac & finance pac installed. Lithium throughout.

Is there a way to interface this with PCs / Macs now that serial ports are no longer there?

Suggestions resources for 48 users if possible.

I played with this thing in depth in the 90s. Found it hard to program & use. I like the screen and some of the software for it but I never took this thing to the limit.

ON SPEED: I recall one of the complaints about this back then was it was a 4-bit machine. Are there mods to "widen the lanes" to 8 or 16 bit or so? This would open up the machine quite a bit.

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

From HP:

HP 50g, 49g+ and 48gii Calculator PC Connectivity Kit

You'll have to install the XModem library on the HP-48GX first (refer to Communications in the HTML Help on how to do it). You you'll need a USB-RS232 adapter and the serial cable, of course.

Lots of software and information are available at Eric Rechlin's hpcalc.org.

Edited: 21 May 2012, 8:21 a.m.

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

RE: Speed.
Short answer no.

The 48GX actually uses a later version of the the same saturn processor found in a 71B, and is in fact the fastest version of it ever made. The original saturn as found in the 71B used an external 4 bit wide bus on which it clocked out addresses as a sequence of 5 nibbles and transferred data nibble at a time. On the versions of the saturn used in the 48 series hardware, a memory controller was added to allow for the attachment of industry standard 8 bit RAM and ROM, so the external bus of these versions is 8 bit and has a separate 17 bit address bus. However I would suspect that internal to the chip you would find the same old 4 bit saturn bus between the processor and the integrated memory controller. The clock speed of the processor in the 48G(X) is already more than 5 times as fast as in the 71B.

[Matt Agajanian]

Thanks for bringing up the subject. I've been pondering between replenishing my 48GX or to just port over my 48 progs to the 50G. As I also am a Mac user with a Firewire & USB 2.0 PowerBook, I am glad that you brought up the connectivity aspect.

Thanks

Edited: 21 May 2012, 1:42 p.m.

[John W Kercheval]

Matt. I am using a loaded MacBook with 500GB SSD and i7 at full speed.

Also have the old stuff.. Eurocom PC.

I have not checked out the 50g. Will do so.

[Garth Wilson]

Quote:

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Is there a way to interface this with PCs / Macs now that serial ports are no longer there?

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B&B Electronics at http://bb-elec.com/welcome.asp makes serial converters, so for example you can get an RS-232 port box that connects to your PC by USB.

[Michael Lopez]

You'll find connecting a HP 48GX to a PC is easy once you have the appropriate adapters & a great way to write programs & back-up the calculator. I have previously successfully used a USB to RS232 cable such as the one shown here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Cable-for-HP-48G-48GX-48SX-w-DVD-Factory-Made-New-/180661859591?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2a10493507 & off course the RS232 communication boards you can add to the newer PCs without a built in serial port.

Would however suggest you also use the original HP Graphing Calculator PC Link software (available here: http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=3713 ) in addition to the XModem based Conn4X (Hp50G ... PC Connectivity Kit)software mentioned above. The newer software is far quicker & permits direct editing of files but is not capable of backing-up the HP 48GX like the older Kermit protocol software can.

Cheers,

Michael