I was astounded to discover that I was voted best speaker at the HHC 2005 conference which wrapped up today in Chicago. I gave two presentations, one on the last year’s work on Nonpareil, and one on the calculator prototype Richard Ottosen and I have built.

Maciej Bartosiak emailed me a new set of PNG image files for the Voyager calculators (HP-11C, HP-12C, HP-15C, HP-16C) which look even nicer, so they will be in the next release.

There were some ROMs shared between the 67 and 97, and between the 19C and 29C, which is not surprising because those were pairs of printing and non-printing machines that were otherwise nearly identical.
And there are certainly many code similarities between various models.
But I was surprised to discover that the Spice series has some large [...]

Nonpareil now runs on Windows, as well as Linux and other Posix platforms.
Nonpareil is cross-compiled from Linux using a GCC cross-compiler targeting i586-mingw32msvc.
There is not yet an installer; it’s just distributed as a ZIP file. It appears that I should be able to use NSIS to create an installer, and still do everything from [...]

I just released version 0.72 of Nonpareil which is the first release to include the 82143A printer support I mentioned here last week. Graphics and custom characters (BLDSPEC) are supported, subject to the same limitations as a real 82143A (42 byte buffer size). The printout is shown in a separate window at two selectable sizes, [...]

There’s some bug that prevents the printer simulation from working on my Fujitsu Lifebook subnotebook (800 MHz Crusoe processsor), but I haven’t yet had a chance to try to debug it. It works fine on my other machines, aside from the problem I noted yesterday with use of the Paper Advance button when the [...]

I added buttons to the Nonpareil printer support for the “print” and “paper advance” functions, and radio buttons for the MAN/TRACE/NORM switch. I’ve posted an updated screenshot.
There’s an interesting bug. When the calculator is not in PROGRAM mode, the print and paper advance buttons behave mostly as expected. In program mode, the print button works [...]

It’s not ready for release yet, but I basically have the 82143A printer simulation in Nonpareil working now! You can see the result of PRA, PRP, and PRSTK in this screenshot.
There’s not yet any way to save or copy the printer output, nor to change the printer mode (MAN/TRACE/NORM) or press the printer ADV or [...]

Nonpareil Release 0.71 restores keyboard operation and includes improved keyboard mappings for Voyager calculators. The 41C bank switching has been fixed so the 41CX Extended Functions now work correctly. The stopwatch mode now works.

Release 0.68 of Nonpareil has much better looking LCD displays for the HP-41C and Voyager series calculators. Now instead of single-pixel-wide “stick digits”, they have segments that look pretty much like the real thing, thanks to the scaling and compositing features of gdk-pixbuf. The Voyager annunciators are also now implemented.