Great white shark sighted in CL reef...

[Ángel Martin]

Rumor has it it´s got banks and teeth a-plenty... so beware!

Better to run for cover in your 4x4 utility vehicle (that is four banks using the Library#4, right?)

Announcing the POWER_CL 4B - Soon at a TOS near you, and already on the CL boards -V4.

[Michael Fehlhammer]

Hello Angel,
congratulations and thank you so much for your precious master pieces!
I especially value your comprehensive documentation and the aesthetic quality of your manuals. I am not quite sure, but maybe some QRGuides are no more up to date now, especially since the Library4- Versions are published (Toolbox4, Sandmath4 ...)?
My affection to vintage HP calculators in a large part results from these wonderful manuals which are a pleasure to study or just to flick through.
Without documention the whole work will be lost soon, nobody will remember exactly, and people will use older, worse, but well documented modules. For example a CCD module instead of AM_OX4.
A sad example of largely futile effort in my eyes are the tons of undocumented lex files ( from the swap discs) for the HP 71.

About the new Power CL:
Is the new version aware of the CL image database, or does it still use its own database? That would prevent me from finding (in Power CL catalogue) my own module, written to flash and inserted into the image database, wouldn't it?
Can you reveal the secret what the two additional banks in the new Power CL module are used for?

[Ángel Martin]

Hi Michael, thanks for your endorsement - I'm glad to hear you find the manuals worth reading, that´s a reward after the time/effort it takes to put them together.

You speak well about the value of the documentation, even for the developers after a while it's a lifesaver and sure it turns enigmas into useful tools. In fact I've spent the last couple of days working on the POWERCL manual update, now ready to go as well.

The posted QRG's should be reasonably up-to-date, but sorely missing are the manuals for the AMC/OSX, ToolBox, and RamPage modules. This is now more evident since the latter two are practically included in the POWERCL_4B version, (alas this is the "secret" about the additional two banks) so I guess I'll have to catch up as well.

Good question about the IMDB vs. the POWERCL internal ROM table. The answer is basically that the POWERCL table doesn't use the IMDB at all, so you're right: your new entries added to the IMDB won't be included in ROMLIB or CLLIB listings.

This makes it compatible with all versions of YFNS, even older ones not using the IMDB - but unfortunately has the shortcoming you point out. Out of curiosity, which new modules are you adding to the IMDB? Would be great to have them included in the released version for the community at large.

Best,
'AM

[Michael Fehlhammer]

Thank you for your explanations, Angel.
I'm currently reactivating my mcode- knowledge, it's twenty something years ago that I was familiar with that. So my own 4-k-module probably is pretty far away,I'm afraid.
But perhaps some users just want to do some modifications to existing modules, and save the result as a new entry. Would it be difficult to implement a routine that checks for the CL-version, and uses IMDB instead of the built-in DB in case of the newer versions?
About QRGs: On TOS I could find a QRG for RAMPAGE, but neither a QRG for the TOOLBOX nor for the AMC_OSX. Is there another source?
Or did you never create them, rating them as unnecessary, due to the similarities to former modules (AMC_OSX <-> CCD, TOOLBOX <> ??? ) ?
You wrote about missing "manuals", not QRGs; maybe I misunderstood and we are talking about the same kind od documentation.

[Ángel Martin]

Believe it or not modifying ROMLIB & CLLIB to use the IMDB is a tall order. Think as well that besides the alphabetical sorting, they provide the additional capability to list the modules by type - which is not a field contained in the IMDB at all.

The best approach for another IMDB CATalog would be writing a FOCAL program to list all entries in the IMDB - including the new ones made by the user. This of course will use YFNS a-plenty, but giving the CL speed it'll go as fast as it gets, so practically no difference with a MCODE routine.

Basically shouldn't be very tough to put together, just using YPEEK, possibly also IMDB?, plus some code/logic to interpret the result. Then looping until there's no more entries... crude but should do the work... right? What about trying yout hand at it :-)

W.r.t. the missing QRG's - will prepare them as soon as possible.

Cheers,
ÁM

[Monte Dalrymple]

It would be possible to upgrade the Image Database to include a type field. There are several unused nibbles in each entry.


The Image Database routines in YFNP use some common subroutines that make finding and accessing entries fairly straightforward, but you'd need to find the page number of YFNP before you could call them. Or, as 'Angel suggests, just use IMDB?

[Monte Dalrymple]

Documentation is available at:

POWERCL B4 Manual

[Richard Wagoner]

Angel - Thanks for the new Power CL extension mod!

I was going through the documentation and noticed that after page
48 the page numbering gets a bit out of sequence. All the information
is there, its just the page numbers...

Rick