A C Compiler For The HP49g+

Cheese Source writes "As previously mentioned on Slashdot, HP's latest and greatest calculator is the HP49g+. While it sports a very powerful (for a calculator) ARM9 cpu, it is only 3 times the speed of the 49g, running at 4MHz. This is because it has to emulate an older processor. Of course, some calculator geeks are now writing adapting a free, open-source C compiler for it. Based on GCC, you can now make programs that run natively on the CPU between 12 and 203MHz. 1000 factorial is calculated and displayed in the blink of an eye (the built in command takes 30 seconds). It will also allow for some great games."

Comments

What is the point

[rkz]

instead of playing games on your calculators do something productive like troll slashdot!

Re:What is the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

I'm one of the people working on this. Maybe I can answer a few questions:

Whats the point? Why Bother?

Well, this is just an obscure hobby; no-one is spending 6 hours a day coding for this project. For me its just a way to learn a little about compilers. The main aim is to make it possible to create decent programs (mainly games) for this system. Coding for devices such as calculators has some interesting challenges to it, esp when you have to reverse engineer the hardware like we did.

Is this a real port of GCC? I thought ARM already has a port.

Yes it does, and its very good. We have tried to avoid modifying GCC itself to avoid extra work in the future. What we have done is write HP specific libraries and linking programs to executable may run. It works, so why not?

1000! in half a second is slow, 10,000! takes about a second to calculate on [some platform]

Indeed. Calculating factorials quickly is easy. Displaying the result (a massive, massive integer) is not. The factorial program trades off some calculation speed to markedly improve display speed. The "half a second" measurement comes from when the CPU is executing at 75MHz. I'm guessing running at 203MHz would speed that up a little.

Is the calculator really running a saturn emulator?

Yes, it is. SysRPL is an obscure language used only in these calculators. The complete Saturn CPU is being emulated, not just the SysRPL envrioment.

Yes, it makes things very slow - but there is a decade of debugged code written in sysRPL and Saturn asm. Throwing all that away would be very expensive for HP. With calculators, having the correct answer is critical. Emulating old code means the ROM should be fairly bug-free.

Of course an OS completely rewritten for the ARM would have been great - but its not economically feasible.

Re:What is the point

[Anonymous Coward]

oops, some more I forgot

Is the 49g+ RPN?

Not by default - but you can set it to be with about 3 button pressed. Then its a proper RPN* calculator unless you set it back.

*The RPN it uses is different from HP's early implementation. The earlier versions have a 4 level stack only. The HP48/9 series effectlvly have an unlimited stack, and you can put all kinds of objects (matrices, programs, symbolics etc) on it. Its alot more powerful then the RPN of say a HP15c, but naturally more complicated to use

Will there be a linux/BSD/[other OS] port?

Well, you have a 203MHz CPU, 512kb RAM, and 2MB ROM. If you can fit linux on that then go for it!

approved calculators

[mmmjoy]

If only my university course didn't enforce non-programmable calculators :(

Re:approved calculators

[Anonymous Coward]

What course is it?

I thought that universities had gotten over programmable calculators.I imagine though they do not want students calling up answers on their wireless pdas.

Re:approved calculators

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but when I was at university (not too long ago) almost *everyone* in the school was lugging around a TI-83+ without a problem.

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that the TI-83's were programmable(?).

Re:approved calculators

[chrism238]

If only my university course didn't enforce non-programmable calculators

or, .... if only your university course took the effort to set assessment questions which would not provide an immediate advantage to those with programmable calculators.

Options?

[dmayle]

running at 4MHz. This is because it has to emulate an older processor

So what they're saying is, rather than porting their calculator software to a new platform, they found it easier to write an emulator that pretends to be the old processor? Sounds like a pretty crappy design decision to me.

Also, if customers are writing their own programs with a C compiler to get speed, why not just use something like the Zaurus running Linux, and one of the many, full featured, science/math software suites for Linux?

Re:Options?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the input interface (buttons vs touchpad) and output interface (greyscale vs energy-guzzling colour screen) of a calculator are more suitable for.. calculating. Pity about the crappy 49g+ keys [repaste 100000000 posts from c.s.hp48 here].

Re:Options?

[ColaMan]

Perhaps they deliberately slowed it down for all the tons of user-written programs out there.

But a "turbo" key would have been handy.

Re:Options?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose the desire to keep the device compatible with legacy software is the reason for the emulation, but if a user-written program can cope with a 3x speed increase, it could handle more as well. The slowdown to just 3x is very likely not deliberate but simply an unavoidable result of the emulation.

Re:Options?

[torpor]

Also, if customers are writing their own programs with a C compiler to get speed, why not just use something like the Zaurus running Linux, and one of the many, full featured, science/math software suites for Linux?

Ah yes, rampant Consumericanism at its finest.

Maybe the reason 'they' 'don't just use something like a Zaurus running Linux' is because they've already got a fine working H49g+ in 'their' posession.

Don't you get it? You're only 'countering the view' on automatic. The solution to every cool hack is not automatically "you can buy something else instead and it'll be cooler".

(Not a Flame, not a Troll. Truly, this is Consumerican 'logic' at its finest...)

Re:Options?

[metalpet]

> So what they're saying is, rather than porting their calculator software to a new platform, they found it easier to write an emulator that pretends to be the old processor? Sounds like a pretty crappy design decision to me.

HP has a bit of an history of using great hardware for their calculators then botching them with inferior software.
The HP48g/gx had 512KB of ROM, a good chunk of it was used to store standard applications programmed in "external" (odd name given to a dialect of RPL that used internal entry-points liberally. Those would render as "<external>" when you'd try to see the source within the calculator, hence the name.) Applications written in "external" would commonly be about 15% faster than user-RPL programs. However in both case, you still use the RPL framework, which means your program is essentially interpreted, token after token.
That may be acceptable for user-written programs, but it's a bit sloppy for processor intensive applications that are in charge of plotting graphs and resolving symbolic equations.

A group of hackers once rewrote a good chunk of the built-in applications entirely in assembly, with the goal of making it fit on a 128K memory card. Unsurprisingly, the resulting environment was many times faster and more responsive than the original version.

That said, a whole lot of software has been written for the HP48 in many areas (although I seem to only remember seeing great games and textbook browsers for some strange reason..)
I can understand the value of an emulator to keep this software library available to the newer models.

Re:Options?

[stud9920]

Because of the millions of apps written for the 48gx ?

Re:Options?

[ricotest]

From the site:

The most commonly used language for advanced programming is 'System RPL', or 'SysRPL'. On modern calculators, SysRPL is mostly executed by an emulated 'Saturn' processor. C on the other hand is executed directly by the ARM chip. The same program written in C will be many (up to 100) times faster then the equivalent SysRPL program.

So possibly the article miswords that the 'emulation' is simply of an older programming language. If it's a common one, I see why they'd keep using it instead of porting to C.

Re:Options?

[mqx]

"Sounds like a pretty crappy design decision to me."

You don't understand Engineering do you?

The design solution to a problem is about getting the best time, cost, risk and other constraints satisfied in the most optimal way possible. It may be lower risk to emulate an old processor than to port and regression test legacy code.

The best technical solution can often be the worst engineering solution, taking into account other cost and risk factors.

Re:Options?

[asbestos_tophat]

Postfix is fun, why do we need anything more than RPN?

Thank you gcc port people you rock ;-)

Oh, HP was 10 years ahead of their time. I still use the old model because there is still nothing like it on the market today. In fact -- the newer series only offer speed as an improvement.

Did they ever fix the sqrt(0) = 1 bug ?

To the troll I say heres a GROB of my ATTN key =oP

Re:Options?

[W2k]

What is it that people have against the 49g+ keys? I've got just such a calculator, and the only complaint I've had is that the calculator was DOA - getting a replacement from HP was fairly painless though, even though I'd bought it on eBay.

Regarding the keys, I find them to be just the right size, easy to read, have a distinct press, and not overly plasticy, despite being made of .. plastic. Yes, if they'd made the keys from brushed aluminium or ebony, carefully hand-crafted by pure-minded tibetan nuns, that would have been nice, but who cares? Compared to my old Casio or my friend's TI, the HP kicks ass, every department. And now a C compiler? Wow. Can't wait to try it.

Re:Options?

[Cereal Box]

What is it that people have against the 49g+ keys?

These sound like the words of someone who has never used HP's 48 series. The keys were made out of a very solid plastic, never wobbled, gave you tactile feedback, etc. I think the other big complaint people have is the placement of the enter key, which was perfect on the 48 (big wide button, center left). Now I believe it's been shrunk and moved to the bottom right.

Now you may not care about all that, but the undeniable truth was that HP had a winning formula on the 48 and they threw it all away with the 49 series.

Re:Options?

[FurrBear]

HP has a bit of an history of using great hardware for their calculators then botching them with inferior software. It's not limited to their calculators. HP-UX anyone?

Re:Options?

[W2k]

Correct, I haven't tried the 48 series. I can, however, recognize a great calculator when I have one in my palm (and I have tried several others, the popular Ti-89 for instance). Maybe the 48 was better, but the criticism against the 49 is clearly overstated.

The keys on my 49g+ are neither wobbly nor is there a lack of tactile feedback. Are the problems you suggest something that I can expect as it gets older (only had it for about 6 months) or do you suggest that my experience using the 49g+ is significantly different from yours fsr?

Re:Options?

[Pigbot]

The design solution to a problem is about getting the best time, cost, risk and other constraints satisfied in the most optimal way possible. It may be lower risk to emulate an old processor than to port and regression test legacy code.

What about debugging and regressive testing of the emulation software? Seems to be "6 of one, half dozen of another" to me. It may be easier to debug emulation software (we would not know unless we saw some source to compare) but either way, they will have to do some serious testing before releasing.

It DOES seem a bit sloppy to do it this way, if debugging is the reason.

Re:Options?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please read through your reasoning; you are inviting a usability comparison of X with Y when you have already admitted never having experienced X. You've only experienced Y for 6 months, moreover.

A flood of people on c.s.hp48, web sites, et al. who have used the HP calculator series for decades would disagree with you. Maybe you have an exceptionally well engineered 49g+, for some qualities requiring exceptional engineering techniques just to your unit (eg injection moulded key labels). I doubt this.

It's a shame when the current generation of users think that "mediocre" ENGINEERING is "great" and aren't even aware of yesterday's "great".

Re:Options?

[3dr]

There is an unending stream of complaints about the 49 series keys on news://comp.sys.hp48/ Google it for some examples. I've no experience with the 49 series.

I purchased a 48gx two years ago so that I'd have one of the last good ones. Crazily enough, I bought it brand-new at Fry's for $95 and now many are going for $250 on ebay. Never would I have considered a calculator an investment.

Re:Options?

[RevAaron]

C'mon- how long does your HP49g+ last on a set of batteries/a charge? Wouldn't you prefer it to last 2 hours, like a Zaurus? Or 4-5 if you buy a C760 or C860. Or, you could be like most Z users and have a pocketful of batteries, at the ready!

Although, with an external keyboard (or a PDA with a *real* keyboard, like a Jornada 720 or Sigmarion 3) it is pretty fun to use GNU Maxima or GNU Octave. Somehow though, it strikes me as lame that you can get a full GUI'd version of GNU Maxima on Windows CE [1], and on the Zaurus you only have text-mode Maxima and Octave. Some pretty bitchen ASCII graphs, though.

Although, on those two CE devices batter life is a fair bit better- on the Jornada 720 you're looking at 12 hours or so (with a 640x480 color screen, 206 MHz StrongARM) and the Sigmarion 3 around 6 hours, though with a fancier 400 MHz PXA255. Not sure why they can't make my C760 Zaurus last a usable length of time.

What I use on Palm OS is an HP48g emulator, pretty slick, since Palm OS itself doesn't have many good math apps. There's LyME, but nothing like an HP or Octave or Maxima.

BLEH!

Re:Options?

[W2k]

Frankly, I couldn't care less what the HP die-hard fanboys think. I'd rather listen to someone with a fresh perspective. To me, the 49g+ is the best calculator I've ever used. Maybe if I had also used a 48-series HP, I wouldn't think so. Does it matter? The 49g+ does its job and then some. There's a point where you get to "good enough" and after that the differences just don't matter anymore. Calling a product "mediocre" just because it doesn't live up to very high expectations is neither fair nor rational.

Re:Options?

[W2k]

I just Googled it. Look what I found regarding the 49g+ keys:

People have been complaining that hp49g+ keyboards dont work right. i emailed hp to hear the other side of the story; they replied the next day. Here's their reply on 7/19/2004:

"Thank you for contacting HP Total Care.
The some of the early ones did have an actual issue with the keyboard. The new ones still 'click' and we have had a couple complaints that they were "loud" but they do work. ALL the time. If anyone still has one of the old ones, and it has this issue, we are replacing the calculator."

How many of the people in comp.sys.hp48 bothered to ask HP about the keyboard issues, I wonder?

Re:Options?

[Pig Hogger]

"Sounds like a pretty crappy design decision to me."

You don't understand Engineering do you?

This is not engineering, but accounting/marketing interference with Engineering at it's best. Some bean-counter along with a marketoid came along and told the engineering team to reuse the old crap because they didn't have the budget (accounting) and time (marketing) to do a good job in the first place.

Re:Options?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many of the people in comp.sys.hp48 bothered to ask HP about the keyboard issues, I wonder?

The first batches of 49G+s were even worse than the current - so bad, in fact, that HP admitted the problem and tweaked a little. Everyone in the group that I'm aware of with such a unit has asked HP for a replacement, and almost everyone got one. (If they're new to the group, and haven't bothered reading any threads before replying, they're quickly pointed to the thousand other which state this.)

If you'd bothered to pick out any post from the ng (or any other HP forum, or hell, even the Amazon reviews..) that wasn't quoting the company on the quality of its own merchandise - cos that'd never be biased, no Sir - you'd see that few people think the problem is fixed. Even HP employees and ex-employees have discussed the issue for the whole 49 series.

These aren't calculator/HP/old-time zealots, they're engineers (and in fewer cases, physicists and mathematicians) who really really want an effective pocket calculating tool in the field. I'd be interested to hear from what profession you speak when you talk of "good enough".

Re:Options?

[miskatonic alumnus]

I had a 48SX for 12 years until the button started to fail --- sometimes taking 3 or 4 presses to work. I'm a math/science teacher, and I used the 48 in class quite a bit. I suspect that some chalk dust got inside and gummed up the keys. I decided to dissasemble it for cleaning. To quote Paul Reubens from Mystery Men --- "Big Mistake!!!" I never could put the keyboard overlay completely back into place.

Well, the problem got worse, until it was barely useable. Fortunately I grabbed a replacement on ebay for about $30.

The 48 is the best calculator I've ever owned.

Re:Options?

[Andy Dodd]

"A group of hackers once rewrote a good chunk of the built-in applications entirely in assembly, with the goal of making it fit on a 128K memory card. Unsurprisingly, the resulting environment was many times faster and more responsive than the original version."

More info please?

(proud HP48gx owner here)

Re:Options?

[mqx]

"This is not engineering, but accounting/marketing interference with Engineering at it's best."

You're a useless idealist; engineering is a _practical_ discipline, and that means working with commercial constraints, including cost and so on.

"Some bean-counter along with a marketoid came along and told the engineering team to reuse the old crap because they didn't have the budget (accounting) and time (marketing) to do a good job in the first place."

Learn something about the real world: engineering isn't this magical place that dictates what the technical solution should be, irrespective of cost and risk and tells accounting and marketing to live with the result. If it worked this way, the VP, managers and PM's would lose their jobs for failing to act realistically and company would go broke for throwing unrealistic amounts of money into a project that never returns profit.

In a real company, everyone works together for the sake of the outcome: i.e. the project. The projects don't always have a open-ended cost sheet, nor an infinite amount of time to reinvent the wheel.

You obviously haven't taken Engineering degree.

Re:Options?

[W2k]

I'm an engineering student. Working on a master's in information technology, specifically. Yes, this means a software developer. I wanted a fast and reliable calculator that had functions for most (all) the university-level maths I need to go through. IT has lots of maths in it, at least where I study.

I have read the posts but I can't seem to find the same problems in my 49g+. Will they develop over time? Maybe, but most of the complaints I read suggested that the problems existed from day 1. Guess my particular 49g+ must be a remarkable piece of engineering, then. :)

Re:Options?

[fitten]

Dunno... there are probably millions of lines of code in the math libraries and the like vs. maybe 100,000 lines of code for the emulator? I dunno the actual numbers, but I imagine there are more lines of code that run on the things than required by the emulator.

Re:Options?

[madcow_ucsb]

Meta Kernel

Way faster than the stock stuff on my 48gx. Too bad the 128kB memory cards were so goddamn expensive so I didn't get it for a long time.

Re:Options?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be interested to hear from what profession you speak when you talk of "good enough".

Sounds just like the whole IT/Computing industry in general

Re:Options?

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

What grad-level mathematics do you study that a HP49g+ is a useful tool? I'm afraid that I don't understand Swedish, and I don't think that all of that school's website is available in English, so if you don't mind answering I would certainly appreciate it.

Re:Options?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your school classifies IT as engeineering? Better rethink the value of that education.

Re:Options?

[W2k]

I've found it very useful for most of my calculus classes (stuff involving integrals, derivatives, matrices, equations with multiple unknown variables, etc), and I believe it will come in handy in physics and mathematical statistics, too. It also utterly ROCKS for simple arithmethic, for those occasions when I can't quite be bothered to do (1024/8*256) in my head, or need to find out what 2^64 is, quickly. RPN is very nice and I just can't get that from a TI.

Having found this C compiler, I'm also playing with the idea of programming a few PDA-like features into it. So far I've only managed to play Tetris on it, however.

Re:Options?

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

Ah, those are all undergrad topics of study in mathematics. All engineering, CS, and Physics undergrads will study those. Yes, a good HP calculator is quite valuable for calculus, aspects of linear algebra, and statistics.

Re:Options?

[jhunsake]

I can't quite be bothered to do (1024/8*256) in my head, or need to find out what 2^64 is, quickly

You're a Master's student? To think that I thought the quality of education in SE was good.

Here's a clue:
2^10 = 1024
2^3 = 8
2^8 = 256
1024/8 = 2^(10-3) = 2^7 = 128
128*256 = 2^(7+8) = 2^15 = 32768
1024/8*256 = 2^(10-3+8) = 2^15 = 32768

I'll give you 2^64, but really you should have 2^0 - 2^32 all memorized.

calculus classes (stuff involving integrals, derivatives, matrices, equations with multiple unknown variables, etc), and I believe it will come in handy in physics and mathematical statistics

What does that have to do with a Master's program in IT? That's stuff that you should have taken as an undergrad.

Re:Options?

[W2k]

Of course I _can_ do (1024/8*256) in my head (with a little effort) or on paper (very easily). That's not the point. (1024/8*256) was only an example of some arithmetic that I can do faster on the calculator than in my head or on paper. IRL examples are, as always, much worse. I'm sure you've seen plenty.

I am not familiar with the term "undergrad", I assume it's part of your school system. Here in Sweden, those things are part of any master's program.

Re:Options?

[Phurd Phlegm]

Frankly, I couldn't care less what the HP die-hard fanboys think. I'd rather listen to someone with a fresh perspective. To me, the 49g+ is the best calculator I've ever used. Maybe if I had also used a 48-series HP, I wouldn't think so. Does it matter? The 49g+ does its job and then some. There's a point where you get to "good enough" and after that the differences just don't matter anymore. Calling a product "mediocre" just because it doesn't live up to very high expectations is neither fair nor rational.

Unfortunately, if we apply this criterion, all discussion effectively ceases. Consider that however atrocious anything is, there is someone who feels it's "good enough." Hell, there're people who think Starbuck's coffee is "good enough."

Re:Options?

[W2k]

It's a fact of life that everything is subjective (and relative). Discussion remains meaningful only while the participants agree on certain core concepts. For instance, you can't discuss whether God is good or evil with an atheist, because to him, the argument is pointless; there is no God in his world.

In this case however, we seem to have a case of conflicting standards. By my standards, the hp 49g+ is clearly a great calculator - and I don't consider my standards for quality to be low. It has however become clear that some people - who presumably have much higher standards for quality - think it's rubbish. I can't say they're wrong because I haven't used a 48-series HP - but on the other hand, I've not had any problems with the 49g+. So it's "good enough". It's a compromise, simple as that.

Re:Options?

[andreyw]

Exactly - you are a part of a /real/ education system, where in 4-5 years you get a masters... unlike the shit diploma-mill system I'm stuck with, whose sole purpose is to shear as much money from me as inhumanely possible. You know how long it would take for me to get a Masters? Well, if I were a complete newb, it would take me about 8 years. 8 fucking years. Un-fucking-believable! Of course, even with cutting corners by trying to evade all the bullshit courses and taking proficiency exams instead of classes where I can, it will still probably take me around 6 years. God damn it.

30 seconds?

[BarryNorton]

What kind of moronic algorithm is being used there?

http://www.luschny.de/math/factorial/FastFactorial Functions.htm

Re:30 seconds?

[imsabbel]

Perhaps the same that make TI calculators need 5 seconds to calculate 50!....
No, really. the 4Mhz cpu it emulates does imho only do 4bit arithmetic, so you need an awfull lot of cycles to handle longer arbitrary precission numbers...

Re:30 seconds?

[nkh]

The TI-92 II takes half a second to compute 50!, less than 2 seconds for 100! but it has some kind of overflow for values greater than 500!

Re:30 seconds?

[phantasma6]

well my TI83+ does 50! more or less instantly

although it only does x! for values of x up to 69

Re:30 seconds?

[BarryNorton]

No, the Saturn has an external word size of 4 bits, but 64 bit registers and instructions.

At three to seven (the actual comparison) times the 4MHz 48g speed, there is far less than a gap of >>30 between the speed of the emulated processor and the physical one so I stand by (for now) my speculation that there is surely an algorithmic difference between the built-in (example?) one and the new 'native' one...

(But what do I know, I'm just flamebait... apparently...)

Re:30 seconds?

[khuber]

No, really. the 4Mhz cpu it emulates does imho only do 4bit arithmetic

Um, no. Saturns have 64 bit registers. They do address on 4-bit nibble boundaries though.

Re:30 seconds?

[BarryNorton]

Now I've two points as informative, the post I contradicted has another (!) and my original post remains 'flamebait'. You can moderate this post however you like but I'll chuck in something (which I forgot in the parent) so that it's not redundant: the processor in the 49g+ runs at 75MHz (hence my comment).

Re:30 seconds?

[RackinFrackin]

well my TI83+ does 50! more or less instantly

The TI-83+ probably only gives an approximation for large factorials. That's what the TI-85 does. The factorial function on my 85 is very fast for values up to 449! (the last integer with factorial less that 10^1000). However, the result isn't exact--it's truncated after 11 digits or so.

Re:30 seconds?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"Perhaps the same that make TI calculators need 5 seconds to calculate 50!"

No. The TI-89 can bust through 50! without any noticeable delay.

The TI's biggest slowness when working with large integers is the display time - the "pretty print" routine is slow when working with them. If you put "(100!)^2->X" in a program and execute it, it only takes a fraction of a second.

Note that the TI does not display integers greater than 10^1000.

Re:30 seconds?

[Nyall]

Displaying the results is a larger problem than doing the factorial.

Re:30 seconds?

[miskatonic alumnus]

I don't have a TI or a HP-49g+. Are you saying that these calculators are actually displaying 65-digit numbers like 50! ? Or, that they are internally representing the calculations using multi-precision arithmetic?

Re:30 seconds?

[miskatonic alumnus]

How so? It should not be a greater problem than multiplying two 6 digit numbers together --- after all, these calculators don't display full precision on numbers like 50!, do they?

Re:30 seconds?

[Nyall]

For integers they do display every digit. On the ti89 calc an integer object can be up to 255 bytes (613 decimal digits). For numbers greater than that the calc will switch over to floating point. So the ti89 can do 299! but not 300! On the hp49g+ the emulated CAS keeps big integers in a variable length binary coded decimal format. And it can support integers much larger than the ti89s 613 digits. The factorial function written in ARM assembly could be computationally faster EXCEPT that it needs to be able to easily turn its results into the variable length BCD format of the 49g+.

Re:30 seconds?

[miskatonic alumnus]

Wow! I didn't know that --- which is why I asked. To have 613 digits of precision (as default behavior anyway) seems like a design flaw to me. I can't think of any application that requires that kind of precision except crypto and modeling proteins or something --- neither of which I can see being routinely done on a calculator.

Re:30 seconds?

[Nyall]

First a correction: 299! will result in 613 digits, but 2^(255*8-1) is 614 digits.

The ti89's and 49g+'s software is a Computer Algebra System, and one of the simplest rules of a CAS (Even on Mathematica) is that if you give an integer input it should return an integer output. If you want an approximate answer on the ti89 you can do:
A) '299.!' //note the decimal
B) approx(299!)
C) set the calc to approximate mode
D) Evaluate the entry line by pressing diamond+ enter, instead of just enter. (diamond is a modifier key like control or alt)

Convergence

[DaveGerbik]

Calculators that feature games and compile C programs, sounds to me like another example of bundling lots of unrelated features into the same hardware.

Re:Convergence

[icespeedskater]

Then I have to wonder why you are using a calculator that features games, compiles C programs and even allows you to waste your time communicating with other nerds using a worldwide network of such calculators...

Re:Convergence

[smittyoneeach]

See, now, your cart and your horse are transposed.
Specifically, the horse in this example is the chip, and the cart is, of course, emacs.
The C compiler is foundational. Now, we need to figure out an interface using the cable kit for a keyboard, and the relentless march of the One True Editor shall take yet another step.
Mwahahahahah...

Re:Convergence

[DaveGerbik]

The difference of course, pocket calculators have always had a very different, far less specific set of features to home PCs/PDAs and have traditionally been built for niche science/maths tasks.

Why start shifting calculators away from their original uses when PDAs are already available for the less specific functions such as nice graphics, sound, GPS and offer the same portability?

RC5?

[digital photo]

Wonder what kind of key'age you can get on one of these "top of the line" calculators...

Re:RC5?

[Andy Dodd]

Many years ago, a friend of mine implemented RSA on his HP48gx.

His intention? Try to get arrested taking it across the border as a way of protesting ITAR. (This was before encryption export restrictions were eased.)

GCC on TI

[eldacan]

GCC has been available for a long time for the 68000 based TI calculators with TIGCC. Is this about a port of GCC that runs on the calculator?

Re:GCC on TI

[Lionel Debroux]

> Is this about a port of GCC that runs on the calculator?
No.

Re:GCC on TI

[khuber]

GCC has been available for calculators with HP's Saturn processors since 1994 (hp48xgcc). This is about using gcc as a cross-compiler for HP's new ARM-based calculator. The summary makes it sound as though someone is writing a compiler which is of course not the case. They are just writing the glue code and linker portions specific to the HP49G+.

Re:GCC on TI

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

68000 based TI calculators
The Motorola 68k-based calculators, the 89, the 92, and the Voyage 200, are unfortunately prohibited most everywhere (ACTs, etc.) due to the onboard computer algebra system. Great calculator on technical merits, though.

Anyone know of a good GCC/other C compiler for the Zilog Z80 TI series (73 and 80 through 86)? I've seen Z80 compilers on the Internet that can output object code linkable into TI programs (using DEVPAC83), but these aren't explicitly designed for TIs: they use their own (strange) font, and they can't reach some calculator features easily from the C libraries.

The Z80 was based on the 8080's design and opcodes, so I'm sure such a compiler could be easily written. Pity is, AFAIK, it's 16-bit, so GCC may not work too well for that.

GCC Mods

[devphil]

I wonder what they had to change in GCC for this project. ARM chips are fairly well supported already.

I poked around briefly in their CVS repo, but didn't see anything obvious that looked like a set of patches to gcc backend source.

Re:GCC Mods

[Jimmy_B]

Most of the work is writing the linker and the C library. Though if they're anything like TIGCC, they'll start accumulating patches to the compiler itself after awhile. Not because the compiler itself needs to be changed, but to work around mismanagement of the gcc main branch.

Re:GCC Mods

[Lionel Debroux]

Yes, that's it.

devphil, if you want more information, check http://p080.ezboard.com/ftichessteamhqfrm5.showMes sage?topicID=2708.topic
and
http://tigcc.ticalc. org

Re:GCC Mods

[Anonymous Coward]

is it too much to ask to use hyperlinks?

Re:GCC Mods

[devphil]

Thanks, guys, appreciate the info.

Re:GCC Mods

[Anonymous Coward]

Not because the compiler itself needs to be changed, but to work around mismanagement of the gcc main branch.

Um, you know that devphil is one of the GCC developers, right?

Keys?

[xtal]

Can anyone confirm that this calculator has the trademark keys - the 49 didn't - and I noticed they switched back to plastic. My 48 is dying and I have pretty much decided to get a tungsten T3 running power48 to replace it, but this would be far superior.

Re:Keys?

[Anonymous Coward]

The new HP49 has better keys than the old one but not as good as the HP48.

Re:Keys?

[khuber]

No. Actually there have been tons of user complaints about how crappy the keys are on the 49g+. Check out comp.sys.hp48 on Usenet or Google groups. Supposedly they have been improved on recent calculators, but there are still complaints.

Just got one

[Anonymous Coward]

Should only be about 3 years before Gentoo finishes compiling. Woohoo!

Re:Just got one

[iamplasma]

Well, that's why you should join the disthpcc project, distributed compiling for your calculator! Using a network of 200 calculators, it'll be done in under a week! Though no solution for KDE running slow just yet...

HP49g+ details

[goon]

for those interested in the the 49g+ in all it's gory technical details.

Re:HP49g+ details

[Sexy Bern]

For those interested in the use of the apostrophe in all its gory details

Re:HP49g+ details

[Nasarius]

IMO, its/it's is forgivable. It's a bit confusing, because you expect an apostrophe for a possessive. What I want to strangle people for is when they put random apostrophes on plurals. Oh, and also "rediculous", "artical", and "alot", which I constantly see on Slashdot.

Re:HP49g+ details

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and it seems that a majority of people here is using "definat(e)ly" instead of "definitely". I'm with you 99% on that strangle-thing -- though you should be aware that some of them might enjoy it.

Re:HP49g+ details

[pez]

Definately.

Re:HP49g+ details

[Kris_J]

My pet hate: DVD's.

Mass production makes strange economies

[xtal]

I suspect it was one of the two:

- Simple economics, if it's cheaper to use the faster processor and emulate the other one, it doesn't matter. Recoding for native operation may not have been possible. This is related to my second point:

- All glitches and problems with the existing design are well documented and hammered out. It may not have been feasible as I suspect there is a lot of verification that happens on these guys before they ship. If the calculator has been painstakenly debugged on one processor, it may very well be easier to insure 100% emulation than re-test all the functions.

Re:Mass production makes strange economies

[Anonymous Coward]

This probably confirms your theory...

Let's hope these same guys can eventually create their full-blown linux-based calc themselves!

Re:Mass production makes strange economies

[mcgroarty]

There is all kinds of commercial software for the 48/49 series which is written in Saturn assembly. Targeting the new CPU directly would break these apps and substantially reduce the market for the calculator.

Re:Mass production makes strange economies

[morcheeba]

You are right in both ways. Even the HP48's emulates system RPL, a language they've carried from previous calculators. It's an intermediate language that offers simpler math functios. The bulk of the stuff the calculator does (like the matrix routines) is written in it.

If the 49 has it's own SysRPL emulator, it would be quite fast (not as fast as pure C, though), but if it's emulating the 48's Saturn processor, which is emulating SysRPL, things could get slow.

p.s. Am I the only one here with the Saturn processor on their resume?

Re:Mass production makes strange economies

[bhima]

well....How can I put this to you.

YES!

Re:Mass production makes strange economies

[morcheeba]

well, darn. :-) Even if I'm the only one, I think supply exceeds demand.

Re:Mass production makes strange economies

[bhima]

I think what makes this really amusing is the number of HP RPN Scientific or graphing calculators that you would find around our labs. To really appreciate this you have to picture a meeting with 8 guys 4 laptops and 8 PDA devices, where when faced with a requirement to do some math someone gets up and gets the nearest calculator. Because we ALL know how to use it and the calc thingy on the various palm size platforms just doesn't make it happen.

Or another time when my boss and I are figuring out the cost estimate of an upcoming project. He takes my numbers (which were in OOO Calc) put them into word then changes on parameter and recalculates on... his graphing calculator (what ever happened to alt-tab) I guess It's that old habits are hard to break so even simple math problems like how much projects will cost winds up being done on RPN calculators.

So in summary knowing how to program the thing well would go a lot further around here than 5 years of VB experience.

Re:Mass production makes strange economies

[LWATCDR]

I can think of two other solutions that might have worked better.
1. A custom ARM chip that runs the saturn ISA directly. TARM has a neat little trick call THUMB that lets you use 16bit instructions on the ARM it decodes them on the fly into ARM 32 bit RISC code so you get the benifits of a small code size while keeping the ability to do 32 bit code.
2. A saturn compiler. Just compile saturn asm into ARM.
Oh well I am sure it is good enough as is.

Yes, finally...

[DrInequality]

...some real news for nerds!

Good thing !

[Lionel Debroux]

Good to see that some programmers are interested in hacking a powerful calculator. They should be able to port great games, despite the rather low screen resolution.
I was already aware of that project, as an user of the TIGCC board (an environment development including heavily patched GCC for TI-68k calculators), which someone else already told about in those comments.

The keys made the 48..

[xtal]

How could you be so short sighted and/or STUPID to not realize that the keys are possibly the best trademark of those old HP calculators? I don't know what the logic was there. I had hoped they brought them back.

My reasoning behind the tungsten emulation was that no keys > crappy keys. :(

Maybe I'll engineer a little keypad for the Palm for numeric entry you can put side by side, like the old HP business calcs.

fun times

[bobo the hobo]

as calculators get more and more powerful and capable, the fun things one can do to them increased. I made something for the ti-83+ that replaces every token (eg. "sin(", "1" and "Q") with "codysux," and I'm currently finishing up a self-propagating virus. I'm sure this just opens up many new possibilities for people to mess with the hardware.

Re:fun times

[ESqVIP]

Viruses don't need to self-propagate do succeed, they just need charisma. Take a look at my signature and see if you can resist.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Games huh?

[Flower]

So how long until a NetHack port is complete? Come on, we all know what's important.

Re:Games huh?

[Justin205]

If it runs NetHack I'd buy one...

Re:Games huh?

[Kris_J]

O. M. G. I was just playing Nethack on the Pocket PC I'm posting this message with.

Re:Games huh?

[Lionel Debroux]

I don't know if that's exactly what you're looking for, but like many TI-68k games, this game can be ported to HP-49G+.

Re:Games huh?

[wideBlueSkies]

LOL U R 2 Funy

Is it reverse polish notation?

[uncl_bob]

...or when did HP switch away from that?

Re:Is it reverse polish notation?

[Brainix]

A 13 second Google search would have verified that this calculator supports "RPN, algebraic, and textbook entry system logic." Scroll down to the "Product Details."

Re:Is it reverse polish notation?

[Fjornir]

But then uncl bob wouldn't have any reason to post!

Contiki port?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now with a C compiler available, how about building an Ethernet interface and porting the Contiki OS to iy? A Contiki port would bring TCP/IP networking, multitasking and a bunch of other cool stuff to the HP. Contiki has already been ported to a lot of weird stuff, like the GBA and the C64, so it would probably work well on the HP.

HP calculator are no more, really.

[Yodalf]

A long time ago i bought an HP41C (not "V"!) and it was (still is...) a very good, small & rugged machine. No nonsense. Back then HP were making the very best calculators in the world.

Nowadays, a certain Miss has decided to decimate the "Calculators" division of HP and it shows. THe present calculators at HP have the same look and (cheesy) feel as the TI calculators. They are bulky and large, they sport cheesy buttons and it is actually hard to find a model that supports the sooo efficient & fast RPN notation. In short: they suck. I feel like we will never ever again see really well built & designed calculators now. Too bad.

Interestingly enough, the only calculator left in their product line that still has the feeling & quality of true HP calculators is the "Financial" HP12C... It seems Economists have it all... !

Maybe we should petition for Agilent to start designing calculators? One can always dream...

Re:HP calculator are no more, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wondered about the link between the rise of HP's CEO Fiorentino (a history major with an advertising background) and the demise of their calculator division.

Re:HP calculator are no more, really.

[C_Ferret]

I still use my 41-CX or an Emulator of the same on my Palm Pilot. As near as I can tell, I should never need more than that. I won't buy any of the current model TI's and HP's look and feel like crap as well these days.

Re:HP calculator are no more, really.

[kisielk]

Hard to find a model that supports RPN? That's funny, I see two here .. three here ... and one here

Re:Convergence - USE GSM(GPRS) for calculating ;)

[radionacht]

Salve,
I would call convergence when I use my mobile and a SSH connection via GPRS to use my Maple version of my home PC on the road. OK, your right the HP calculators do have a better keyboard and the display shows better plots, but why not use a HP calculator with SSH conection via mobile to the home PC? I would call it "mobile shell" that offeres much more than using maple *g*. There is a free J2ME SSH1 Client:
http://phoenix.inf.upol.cz/~polakr/

BTW: Any chance to get a HP48GX programming manual, today? I borrowed it one guy - but he never brought it back ;(

Build Libtomcrypt for it!

[kyhwana]

Someone port Libtomcrypt to it!
It compiles in ARM CPU's already, I believe.
Crypto on your calculator!

Re:Build Libtomcrypt for it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! Now my calculator can be a munition!
Vote Libertarian if you think that's as dumb as I do.

"That's not a calculator..."

[po8]

Note that Nickle will quite happily compute 10,000! (exactly) in a fraction of a second on a similar machine, through the miracle of Karatsuba multiplies. It also supports arbitrary-precision rationals and definable-precision floats (default 256b mantissa) with arbitrary exponent, and features a calculator-like interactive mode. I don't use much of anything else for numeric calculations anymore. (Of course, I co-wrote it.)

Re:"That's not a calculator..."

[computer_chacham]

And in Mathematica 5.01, 1 000 000! takes 9.875 seconds on an Athlon 1700+. 10 000! took .016 seconds. (Of course, I didn't co-write it)

Re:"That's not a calculator..."

[jim3e8]

Now that's impressive. I did the same experiment with 'calc' and 'nickle' on a 512M Athlon 1700 system.

calc: 50,000! 7 sec
nickle: 50,000! 11 sec
calc: 1,000,000! -- No result after 15 min, used 3 megs memory
nickle: 1,000,000! -- Used 500+ megs memory after 5 minutes, 500 megs of swap, and brought system to its knees.
Hey, I thought the 2.6 scheduler was supposed to fix that.

Re:"That's not a calculator..."

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting,really, to see the difference between calc and nickle here:
I fed both of them with 1 000 000!.
calc bottoms out the CPU, while nickle eats what ram it can get its hands on.

(This is a system almost identical to yours, though with FreeBSD 5.2.1. The ULE scheduler seems to hold up nicely. It's kind of slow, but usable.)

Re:"That's not a calculator..."

[computer_chacham]

That might be a problem with displaying all the digits...1 000 000! is approx. equal to 2.8 x 10^456573 which would take an incredibly long time to print out. I asked Mathematica to suppress the output ;)

Re:"That's not a calculator..."

[computer_chacham]

Whoops, missed a zero. That would be about

8.3 x 10^5565708, which would take an even incredibly longer time to print out...

Re:"That's not a calculator..."

[Anonymous Coward]

[Posting with delay, as /. incorrectly thought I posted 10 article last week]

Just went to the website. Looks interesting, but you could use a little marketing there.

Not for changing the look of the website, it is okay, but you fail to explain to the lurker what nickle really is (specifically, what is his positionning).

After glancing through the front page, I had no idea what it /really/ was. I had to re-read carefully, and beleived that it was some sort of advanced bc. I then read the tutorial, and, at this point, I was really confused.

Nickle page says:

www.nickle.org: "Nickle is a programming language based prototyping environment with powerful programming and scripting capabilities"

The key thing is that this can apply to perl, ruby, python, lua, maple, or any other thousand of similar environments out there.

What I don't understand, reading that sentence, is what the main 'competitors' of nickle are. Are they math software ? Are they scripting language ? Are they prototyping environments ? Is it C ?

What I would have expected from your website is getting enough precise info so that, the next time I have some specific problem, it 'clicks' in my mind, and I could say: "Let's give nickle a try".

Re:"That's not a calculator..."

[po8]

Thanks for the insightful comment! The Nickle frontpage really could use some help as you suggest.

Part of the problem is that Nickle has evolved over 20 years from being a bc-like thing to being a language that you really can answer "yes" to for everything in your next-to-the-last paragraph. :-)

Common use cases for Nickle:

• Calculate in a reasonable calculator language featuring arbitrary precision rationals, settable high-precision floats, and nice calculational features. (Competes with e.g. bc, expr.)
• Prototype some tricky functions in a PL that looks a lot like C but with no limits, GC, a nice subtyping system, and an interactive environment. When the code works, translate easily to C for performance and integration. (Competes with e.g. Scheme, Matlab.)
• Script in situations requiring real datatypes and advanced algorithms with clean syntax and semantics. (Competes with e.g. Python, Perl.)
• Learn about advanced programming features and techniques like continuations and threads in a friendly, rich interactive environment. (Competes with e.g. Scheme, ML, Haskell.)

Most of my use falls into one of these categories.

Anyone else...

[bombshelter13]

... think this calculator would, if nothing else be an amazing way to earn geek street cred? I mean, if programming (1 geek point) computer games (2 points) on an overclocked (3 points) calculator (4 points) using an open source (5 points) compiler isn't the pinnacle of all that is geek I don't know what is.

Re:Anyone else...

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, if programming (1 geek point) computer games (2 points) on an overclocked (3 points) calculator (4 points) using an open source (5 points) compiler isn't the pinnacle of all that is geek I don't know what is.

Doing it in bed with twins. Blondes, preferably.

Re:Anyone else...

[Keebler71]

Two words: beowolf cluster.

Re:Anyone else...

[Registered Coward v2]

I mean, if programming (1 geek point) computer games (2 points) on an overclocked (3 points) calculator (4 points) using an open source (5 points) compiler isn't the pinnacle of all that is geek I don't know what is.

Doing it in bed with twins. Blondes, preferably.

except wearing a calculator on your belt (6 points) and being able to disucss how games run cool on an overclocked OS OS (7 points) is a sure way to turn off the opposite sex

Re:Anyone else...

[seanadams.com]

eh... sorry.

You have to do it in assembler for the full 5 points.

Re:Anyone else...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting that for full geekiness you need a transparent (2 points) case mod (4 points).

Hello grammer

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

while the post can first be read by the editors with grammatical corrections the flow of the story could hopefully be found.

Seriously, Michael give me your snail mail address and I will send you the MLA guide. We will have you making sentences in NO time.

Re:Hello grammer

[Anonymous Coward]

h3110 t3h Zp311ig g|24//.m3r n4Zi

You betcha sonny boy.

[porkchop_d_clown]

The only fan mail I ever received was for an "adventure game" I wrote for the HP-41CV.

Guy wrote me a 9 page letter explaining to me how I wrote my own program.

Re:You betcha sonny boy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please share! Sounds too delicious to miss out on :)

Re:Hello grammer (sic)

[pjt33]

Pot, meet kettle. I presume your subject line should be interpreted as "Hello, grammar"?

Nah, need to run a webserver on it...

[hughk]

For true geekiness, you need to be able run a webserver on it.

Re:Nah, need to run a webserver on it...

[raynet]

Extra points for getting it posted on Slashdot and surviving it..

Re:Nah, need to run a webserver on it...

[Krunch]

Making a cluster of calculators running web servers just to survive the Slashdot effect will give you even more points.

Unfortunately, no.

[porkchop_d_clown]

A quick check of comp.sys.hp48 will show hundreds of posts complaining about key bounce and other issues.

I'm fairly disappointed with my 49G+, I'm looking forward to this machine, which was designed by some of the old HP48 engineers, I believe.

Re:Unfortunately, no.

[Bastian]

I'm interested in that, but before I'm going to buy it that picture on the top-right damn well better feature a crappile of calculator keys.

Re:Unfortunately, no.

[jx100]

Do they offer a model in Klingon?

good question...

[Penguinoflight]

mod up please.

Don't Fsck with your bankers....

[hughk]

Its not the economists, it is the investment bankers and the analysts. Take away their HP12Cs and what would they turn to for the time/money calculations? This is a very good way of committing financial suicide.

Re:Don't Fsck with your bankers....

[wik]

We have already seen that the investment bankers and analysts can't do basic math (c.f., the late '90s) . Take away their calculators and they might have to start thinking. Bring it on!

Re:Don't Fsck with your bankers....

[hughk]

Most investment bankers I know are more than a little proficent with mathematics, their perception of probability tends to be that of the seasoned gambler. The management tends to be worse, and until some of the recent regulations came in, you didn't adjust your profits by discounting the risk.

battery usage?

[teridon]

What happens to the battery life when you run the ARM at higher clock?

Re:battery usage?

[Talez]

It goes down.

Re:battery usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not running the processor at a higher clock - they're running code natively instead of on an emulator for the previous architecture. Less cycles spent on emulating, more cycles spent on computing.

Large number

[rossdee]

"1000 factorial is calculated and displayed in the blink of an eye (the built in command takes 30 seconds)."

So how big a display has this thing got if it can display 1000! Not sure how big it would be, my guess is somewhere between a googol and a googolplex.

Re:Large number

[ivarneli]

1000! is 2565 digits long... approximately 4.0238 x 10^2564.

Larger than a googol, and just barely smaller than a googolplex. :)

Re:Large number

[Hektor_Troy]

It only has 2568 characters ... that's not so bad.

Re:Large number

[raytracer]

1000! has 2568 digits. It is indeed between a googol and a googolplex, but much nearer to the googol.

Re:Hello grammer (sic)

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

Pot, meet kettle. I presume your subject line should be interpreted as "Hello, grammar"?

Yes, I should definitely spell a subject like Grammar correctly if I am chastising someones lack of familiarity with it, I could not have done that intentionally.

Yes, we are both black :-)

Why do you need 10000! ?

[Chemisor]

Could someone please enlighten my poor brain and suggest some practical use for the exact value of 10000!, and why I might require its computation in a fraction of a second? I'm afraid I don't think too good.

Re:Why do you need 10000! ?

[RollingThunder]

It's simply an easy metric to test a calculator by. Takes virtually no effort to enter or explain it.

Re:Why do you need 10000! ?

[po8]

It's mostly a metric of multiplication speed. There are lots of times you need to do a lot of large multiplications in a fraction of a second.

That said, my students were recently working on an ICPC problem in which they needed to find the last non-zero digit of large factorials. "How will we check our solutions?" they asked. Heh...

Re:Why do you need 10000! ?

[pkhuong]

Bignums.... And the LAST non-zero digit (as opposed to the first digit) is trivial :p

hard to tell from that pic

[porkchop_d_clown]

The older version of the site showed that it's a clamshell case - the bottom half flips down to reveal a large calculator style keyboard.

They used to have pics of their prototype spread out over the bench, with all the chips in view and the keys on the keyboard all hand-labelled.

I guess they've gotten funding since then. :-P

Re:hard to tell from that pic

[green pizza]

They used to have pics of their prototype spread out over the bench, with all the chips in view and the keys on the keyboard all hand-labelled.

Are these the photos you were talking about?
http://www.hpcalc.org/qonos.php

Rather than ethernet ...

[hotspotbloc]

Now with a C compiler available, how about building an Ethernet interface and porting the Contiki OS to iy? A Contiki port would bring TCP/IP networking, multitasking and a bunch of other cool stuff to the HP.

Why go with ethernet when you could have a SD 802.11b / 256M card? The question is can SDIO cards work on the 49+?

TI-60 needs 3 mins to calculate 300C300

[elgatozorbas]

Long time ago I decided to find out what was the most efficient way to keep my TI60 busy. Turned out it needed over three minutes (blank screen) to calculate the number of combinations of 999 elements in groups of 999 (or whatever was the highest number you could enter), the answer of which was 1, by the way...
Z

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Peak Into Code For 1000!

[dunc78]

if( Command = "1000!" )
print( 4.0238 x 10^2564 )
end

It is highly optimized code, that is why it computes the number so fast.

Is it just me....

[Erik Hollensbe]

... but does the fact that talking about a calculator and feeling the need to link to a definition of the concept of a factorial shed a not-so-positive light on the average intelligence of the person reading this article?

The price!

[mantera]

I just noticed this calculator is not that cheap. Can someone please explain to me why one would want to buy it instead of a PDA?
thanks.

Re:The price!

[Vlion]

Because it has a huge library of math functions.

Re:The price!

[mantera]

Aren't there any software-based calculators for PDAs that have "a huge library of math functions"?

I just got the 49g+ yesterday

[Vlion]

because I knew hp-gcc existed.
I'm liking this calculator.
I've owned a TI-86 for a few years, so I know a bit about higher-end calcs.
The keyts are nice and firm, with a "pop" type feeling when I push them.
I can switch between RPN and normal entering mode.
The menus are a bit unintuitive.

I even have the IR port on it, plus what looks to be a memory slot.

I like it. My TI is nice, mind you.
But this is much slicker.
And, I can now do some good old C programming with it. ^_^

The doom of the calculator

[stonecypher]

... is nigh.

See, the only thing that's been preventing the gameboy from being a kickass calculator is the relatively awful control system. However, the upcoming DS has two screens, one of them a touchscreen; you can't get a better small-platform simulation setup than that, IMO, since you can change the key layout per task, and if nessecary trade the keys temporarily for a whole second screen.

It's like a palm pilot calculator, except that it still has a screen while the keys are up, eliminating the most sucking thing about palm pilot calculators.

Seperately, you never need to bother with a connection cable, because it does 802.11, and the screen is quite nice - backlit 256x192 fullcolor with hardware-assisted 3D with antialiasing. The graphing potential of such hardware is massive. You can use sprites for things like cursors and flow analysis.

Oh, right: and the underlying CPU blows the doors off of a 4mHz ARM9. It's got a 66mHz ARM9 *and* a 33mHz arm7. 8 meg of ram for large matrix calculations. The ability to network.

Oh, and games on a gameboy are better than games on any TI.

The end is nigh. HEED MY WARNING. Calculator advocates, repent - unification is at hand, commodity hardware defeats characteristic purpose hardware, generalization is cheaper than specific hardware, the ASIC falls at the sword of the CPU.

Linux boxes for VCRs, Linux boxes for game systems, Linux boxes for kitchen appliances, but when it matters, turn to Nintendo for your calculator.

And in case you were wondering, yes, I'm the gameboy stonecypher, and yes, my calculator, based largely on gnuplot and yacas, is about three quarters done. I may not know shit about math, but my Nintendo sure does.

+1, Insightful to anyone who compares YACAS and whatever other computer algebra systems there are to HP's bujillion calculators I can't be bothered to research.

Re:The doom of the calculator

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but will teachers let students bring in a gameboy for exams? I think not. Students make up 90% of the calculator market.

Also, a gameboy will chew batteries much faster then a calculator will.

"Oh, right: and the underlying CPU blows the doors off of a 4mHz ARM9. It's got a 66mHz ARM9 *and* a 33mHz arm7"

dude, the HP49g+ has an ARM9 rated at 200MHz

"Calculator advocates, repent - unification is at hand, commodity hardware defeats characteristic purpose hardware, generalization is cheaper than specific hardware, the ASIC falls at the sword of the CPU."

There is no ASIC's on the HP, its all standard off-the-shelf parts!

Re:The doom of the calculator

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but will teachers let students bring in a gameboy for exams? I think not.

On the other hand, they're also fairly restrictive about the calculators you could bring in - anything with large amounts of onboard storage and the ability to run arbitrary programs would likely be disallowed.

Re:The doom of the calculator

[xigxag]

The end is nigh.

No it's not. Calculators are bought by two kinds of people.

1) Students. Students can't use calculators with softkeys.

2) Professionals. Most professionals want calculators that actually work, not some Gameboy hack designed by Joe Shmoe that comes up with 2.99998 when asked to calculate the square root of nine. (They also want calculators with tactile feedback, long battery life, and the ability to work after being dropped a couple of times.)

[G]eneralization is cheaper than specific hardware

That's why my PC is cheaper than my XBOX. I mean, that's why my Palm is cheaper than my remote control. I mean, that's why my Hitachi 4GB Microdrive is cheaper than my iPod Mini. Hmm.

Anyway, calculators just in terms of hardware are cheap. But, er, good luck with that.

Re:The doom of the calculator

[Ch_Omega]

"...Oh, right: and the underlying CPU blows the doors off of a 4mHz ARM9. It's got a 66mHz ARM9 *and* a 33mHz arm.."

On HP's website, the HP49G+ is listed as having a 75MHz ARM9. It's because it's emulating the old Saturn CPU, that makes it run only three times faster than a 4MHz Saturn processor. By compiling code that runs directly on the 75MHz ARM9, this calculator will run the same code faster than on a 66MHz ARM9, but maybe you didn't bother to read the links provided in the article.

Re:The doom of the calculator

[Mateito]

YES!!!

So when you find that you can't fully reduce a matrix, you just bring on SUPER MARIO to kick the living shit out of the rouge entries.

ROCK AND ROLL.

Re:The doom of the calculator

[stonecypher]

1) Students. Students can't use calculators with softkeys.

Why not? More importantly, since half of them already have a GameBoy, why waste $100 on a ti graphical?

not some Gameboy hack designed by Joe Shmoe that comes up with 2.99998 when asked to calculate the square root of nine.

Way to generalize. If you had read what I wrote, you'd notice that I use YACAS, which is of very high quality.

[G]eneralization is cheaper than specific hardware

That's why my PC is cheaper than my XBOX.

I couldn't have picked a better example if I had been intentionally sarcastic. The XBox is very cheap specifically because it *is* a PC, and had far lower development and delivery costs than proprietary systems like the PS2.

I mean, that's why my Palm is cheaper than my remote control.

Now you're just being stupid. A palm isn't generalized hardware in the theme of a remote control. Similarly, a PC, no matter how general, will not become cheaper than a hammer when used to whack things. Try to make examples with some common sense; they carry more weight that way.

Anyway, calculators just in terms of hardware are cheap

Not as cheap as something you already own.

Yes.

[porkchop_d_clown]

Glad you still had the link - it's not visible on HPCalc's main page any more.

why the hp48gx owns ti calacultors

[demon4]

MANY of you may have never used the hp48gx but this calculator owned all others out on the market (ti 80 or something) it came out a in the early 90s and had way more features. This included an ir port (turn on the tv in class), internal clock, memory card slots, speaker (yes could play midi type music), and built in rom chip with equations and constants. However it was rpn, reverse polish notation, and a steep learning curve for the average guy because the builtin software was slow and clumsy. What made this calculator great was all the engineering programming for it. The functionality on the hp48gx is much greated than even the ti 89. you can do laplace transforms, integrate, change from floating point to fractions, solve equations for variables, and cheat is lots of other ways. that's why it owns it also included a soft zipper case, was well constructed, only used 3 triple a batteries, and good buttons (clicky). I haven't tried the 49 but i hear they hired some of the programmers that worked on the 48 programs to write the stuff for the 49. Sorry to hear they took out the ir port and made the buttoms plasticy, but hopefully the software is good now. =]

Re:why the hp48gx owns ti calacultors

[Ch_Omega]

The HP49G+ has an IR port, expandable memory, and HP have improved the keys on the new ones. I have had no problems with either the keys or the famous "screen earthquake" happening with earlier versions of the HP49G+ software.

[nt] not to mention wireless freakin networking

[Anonymous Coward]

DMCA

[tepples]

See, the only thing that's been preventing the gameboy from being a kickass calculator is the relatively awful control system. However, the upcoming DS has two screens, one of them a touchscreen

From speculation I've read on gbadev.org, the only thing keeping the upcoming Nintendo DS handheld gaming system from being your programmable graphing calculator is the encryption on the cartridge port, making it impossible to get a homebrew program onto the system. In addition, ignorant instructors are more likely to confiscate a Nintendo graphing calculator than a TI or HP graphing calculator.

Re:DMCA

[stonecypher]

Yeah, they used to day they could keep us out of SIO with encryption, too. That didn't work either. None of N's encryptions schemes have worked. They're really there to make it expensive to make 3rd party hardware and to give weight to claims of encryption circumvention, not to defeat anyone. The encryption schemes are rudimentary at best.

As far as ignorant instructors, well, the idea is that someone would release this commercially. Given that the DS still won't application multitask, and given that it has WiFi, it's a simple matter to give the instructor a program guaranteeing that all DSes in the room are reporting to his/her PC as calculators.

Incidentally, that also makes disseminating information easier.