I recently learned that the reason I’ve had trouble all my life with keeping my shoelaces tied is that I was taught to do it incorrectly. There are two major steps to tying a standard shoelace bow, and each step can be done in two mirror-image manners. If you pair the steps incorrectly, [...]

Got the HP-11C firware working well enough in NSIM that it displays “Pr Error” at startup, which is what it’s supposed to do. Then pressing the ON key will get a “0.0000″ display. Nothing beyond that though. At least it’s progress.
I still need to merge the Nut simulator from NSIM into CASMSIM, [...]

I caught a cold from my roommate. I don’t want to give it to coworkers, and I don’t really feel up to going out anyhow. I can’t really work from home at the moment, so when I wasn’t feeling quite so miserable I spent a few hours hacking on CASMSIM.
I cobbled together an [...]

I purchased the new book “The Elder Gods” (The Dreamers, Book 1) by David and Leigh Eddings last night at Borders. The Eddings’ have been my favorite fantasy authors ever since I read “Pawn of Prophecy” (book 1 of the Belgariad) back in the mid 1980s.
When I got home, I discovered that they’d stuck [...]

I spent some time trying to figure out how to use the X shape extension to have the window shaped like the calculator. At first I tried loading a separate image mask bitmap, but later realized that it would be much better to simply use an image format that supports transparency, such as PNG. [...]

I’ve typed in the source and object code for a preproduction HP-01 calculator watch from U.S. Patent 4,158,285. I need to write a new assembler for it; the style of assembly code changed quite a bit compared to the first generation CPU.

Implementing reflection (otherwise known as a meta-object protocol) in C is no fun at all…

I’ve typed in the partial HP-65 source code from U.S. patent 4,099,246. It’s only the first half of the code, unfortunately, so it won’t really do much good in CASMSIM until I can dump the remainder out of the real calculator. The file (hp65.asm) is in the Subversion repository in case anyone is [...]

CASMSIM 0.19 finally has support for slide switches. This is currently necessary for the timer/program/run switch on the HP-55, but will also be needed for other models in the future.
The switches shown on-screen are really ugly at the moment. I’m using GTK+ radio buttons in the mode where they display as normal buttons, [...]

CASMSIM 0.17 adds simulation of the HP-80 financial calculator.