NEW: HP 15C Collectors Edition

[ijabbott]

(05-05-2023 06:53 AM)Dave Dirckx Wrote:  Well, I preordered two of them (no shipping cost to Belgium via eduwinkel.nl).
A reissue of the 42S would be nice, but also lusting after a 16C reissue. Concerning reissues, I prefer that look and feel are as close as possible to the original.

I can't see the original Pioneer cases making a comeback, but a 42S CE in the form factor of the silver 17bii+ would be nice.

[Eddie W. Shore]

(05-06-2023 12:56 PM)ijabbott Wrote:  

(05-05-2023 06:53 AM)Dave Dirckx Wrote:  Well, I preordered two of them (no shipping cost to Belgium via eduwinkel.nl).
A reissue of the 42S would be nice, but also lusting after a 16C reissue. Concerning reissues, I prefer that look and feel are as close as possible to the original.

I can't see the original Pioneer cases making a comeback, but a 42S CE in the form factor of the silver 17bii+ would be nice.

I would always welcome another 42S. HP could fit a 27S CE, with an RPN mode, in the silver 17bii+ case.

[Steve Simpkin]

(05-06-2023 12:56 PM)ijabbott Wrote:  ...
I can't see the original Pioneer cases making a comeback, but a 42S CE in the form factor of the silver 17bii+ would be nice.

I can't be 100% sure but the HP 17BII+ *may* be a complete re-write of the HP 17BII functionality without using the original ROM firmware or Saturn emulation. I base this possibility on the Wikipedia entry that claims "The newer 17bII+ (F2234A), introduced in 2007, with Sunplus Technology SPLB31A CPU was developed and is manufactured by Kinpo Electronics." This is a similar to the CPU used for the HP-12C Platinum, HP 33S and HP35S, none of which used Saturn emulation.

If this is the case, it may be difficult to repurpose the HP 17BII+ platform to turn it into a HP-42S. Performance wise, I don't believe the 8-bit SPLB31A would be a good candidate for Saturn emulation. Its 4288 bytes of RAM would also not be enough to accomodate a HP-42S emulation and 7.2K Bytes of memory space.

I would like to know more about the internals of the HP 17BII+ and also if the above assumptions seem to be true.

SPLB31A Datasheet:
https://www.ic72.com/pdf_file/-/428519.pdf

[WallyEmm]

I believe someone asked this question in an earlier post, but I don't remember seeing an answer. Will US sales of the 15C-CE be affected by the different HP licensee for the US? Is it certain the calculator will be available on the US market?

Along those lines, the 15C-CE data sheet includes a link to https://www.hpcalcs.com but the link forwards to https://hpofficesupply.com/ which is the Royal Consumer Information Products website. There is no mention of the HP 15C-CE on the Royal site.

Thanks,
Wally

[linq2008]

https://hpcalcs.com/product/hp-15c-collectors-edition/

(05-07-2023 06:01 AM)WallyEmm Wrote:  I believe someone asked this question in an earlier post, but I don't remember seeing an answer. Will US sales of the 15C-CE be affected by the different HP licensee for the US? Is it certain the calculator will be available on the US market?

Along those lines, the 15C-CE data sheet includes a link to https://www.hpcalcs.com but the link forwards to https://hpofficesupply.com/ which is the Royal Consumer Information Products website. There is no mention of the HP 15C-CE on the Royal site.

Thanks,
Wally

[WallyEmm]

(05-07-2023 06:03 AM)linq2008 Wrote:  https://hpcalcs.com/product/hp-15c-collectors-edition/

Thanks for that, the direct link worked for me. That prompted me to use a VPN to teleport myself to London, and https://www.hpcalcs.com went to the Moravia site. So apparently forwarding to the Royal site occurs when a US IP address is detected.

Wally

[Thomas Radtke]

(05-07-2023 05:56 AM)Steve Simpkin Wrote:  If this is the case, it may be difficult to repurpose the HP 17BII+ platform to turn it into a HP-42S.

Maybe MORAVIA can redesign the circuit to take a SoC capable of emulating the 42S?

[Didier Lachieze]

(05-07-2023 08:06 AM)Thomas Radtke Wrote:  

(05-07-2023 05:56 AM)Steve Simpkin Wrote:  If this is the case, it may be difficult to repurpose the HP 17BII+ platform to turn it into a HP-42S.

Maybe MORAVIA can redesign the circuit to take a SoC capable of emulating the 42S?

Everything is possible but what will drive the decision is ROI. I don’t think Moravia will invest in new hardware only for CE models, this would need to be amortized over a large number of units.

So right now the low hanging fruits for Collector’s Editions are Voyager models. I see the 16C as the most likely candidate after the 15C and the developments going on here seem to be perfectly timed for that

[anetzer]

(05-07-2023 08:06 AM)Thomas Radtke Wrote:  

(05-07-2023 05:56 AM)Steve Simpkin Wrote:  If this is the case, it may be difficult to repurpose the HP 17BII+ platform to turn it into a HP-42S.

Maybe MORAVIA can redesign the circuit to take a SoC capable of emulating the 42S?

Given the size of the potential market Moravia might just start thinking about joining forces and start cross-licensing and cooperating with other players in the modern RPN arena.

I mean: Isn‘t it a joke, HP doing more or less virtualised re- and re-re-issues of historic models while others fiercely develop RPN into the future?

[Thomas Radtke]

I was hoping for more, but you guys are likely right.

I guess the components to build 50g's are no longer available? That's one of the more recent calculators I'd like to see again. And a 35SII would be my favorite project, but today no one would be able to write a bugfree firmware for such a monster. IIRC the original sources were Assembler.

[brouhaha]

(05-07-2023 11:02 AM)Thomas Radtke Wrote:  And a 35SII would be my favorite project, but today no one would be able to write a bugfree firmware for such a monster. IIRC the original sources were Assembler.

The 35s code was reportedly written in C, and compiled to 6502 code.

The 6502 is great for some things, and I've written a lot of 6502 assembly over the years, but an efficient platform for C code it ain't.

[Thomas Radtke]

That's good news. Or would be, if the sources were available.

Thanks!

[grbrum]

I will order a couple when it becomes available in the US

[brouhaha]

(05-07-2023 06:52 PM)Thomas Radtke Wrote:  That's good news. Or would be, if the sources were available.

Not available to the general public. Available to the relevant people in HP and Moravia, almost certainly.

I have no way to know, but it's highly likely that HP, and perhaps some employees of Moravia, have the 10bii+, 12c Platinum/Prestige, 17bii+, 20b, 30b, 33s, and 35s source code. Probably also the source code for most Saturn-based calculators as well, for what that's worth.

But they probably don't have much pre-Saturn source code. I mean, HP once asked ME for a copy of the 12C source code, which I didn't (and don't) have. As I understand it, they were able to track down a copy of the 12C source code, though more recently I've heard it stated that HP doesn't have "usable" source code for the 12C. I suspect that may mean that they don't consider ~6000 lines of Nut assembly source code to be "usable". I don't even necessarily disagree, despite that I do a fair bit of hacking Nut assembly code. Programming in Nut assembly, and even Saturn assembly, is much more difficult than e.g. C or C++.

[Valentin Albillo]

.
Hi, brouhaha and all,

(05-07-2023 04:35 PM)brouhaha Wrote:  The 6502 is great for some things, [...]

Such as Chess programming, for instance. See:

CPW - Chess Programming Wiki

Quoting Dan and Kathe Spracklen on the advantages of the 6502 compared to 8080/Z80 while porting Sargon: {the underlining is mine}

Danny Spracklen: Yes, the instruction set was a little more efficient, I think, and more- it was more, if you could say, RISC like. ... It was a simpler instruction set, but it actually- the cycle times on the individual instructions were very fast, like one microsecond, instead of like 4 or 5 microseconds, on the Z-80.

Kathleen Spracklen: Yes. And it had the short branch. You can’t underestimate the value that the short branch offered. They had the ability- if you could branch within a one byte distance of where you were, and using it as a sign number, positive or negative, you had an extremely fast branching instruction. So if you could make loops very, very small and tight, you could really run with high, high speed.

Also, quoting from this post in 6502.org

Right, the Z80 based machines all seem to top out at about 1500 ELO or so, despite clock speeds sometimes reaching 7.5MHz. By comparison, even the slower 6502 machines with only a 2MHz clock run at around 1700 ELO, with the later (faster) 65C02 machines starting at 1800 ELO. A difference of 300 ELO points is enough that the lower rated machine would hardly ever win (nor even draw) a game.

This is despite, in some cases, the same programmer having written the engine. So there definitely seems to have been something about the 6502 that favoured its use for chess, more than the usual difference in efficiency noted between the two.

Regards.
V.

[brouhaha]

(05-07-2023 11:54 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  Such as Chess programming, for instance. See:
CPW - Chess Programming Wiki

Fully agree as far as Chess programming in assembly language goes. The 6502 would likely be just as inefficient for a Chess program written in C as it is for almost anything written in C. One of the fundamental problem is the lack of a suitable addressing mode for local variables in stack frames. Another is the lack of efficient 16-bit add and subtract. A Chess program written in 6502 assembly needs little of either, but for any non-trivial C program, the Z80 has the 6502 beat. (Being somewhat of a 6502 aficionado, it pains me to say that.) The 6502 makes up for that a little bit in having over 3x the memory bandwidth as the original Z80 when run at the same clock frequency, but newer Z80-compatible microcontrollers have significantly closed that gap.

There are techniques that a better C compiler could use to lessen the stack frame problem, involving static call graph analysis. Microchip's XC8 compiler for their 8-bit PIC microcontrollers does that. AFAIK, there is no existing C compiler for the 6502 that does it.

There's also no reason that any calculator designed today, other than a very cost-sensitive one, would need to use a 6502-derived microcontroller. At the time the Sunplus 6502-derived microcontroller was chosen fir use in various HP calculators, there was still a significant cost advantage to that 8-bit microcontroller compared to 32-bit microcontrollers (e.g. ARM). In the past decade that cost advantage has shrunk substantially.

One of the problems with making an ARM-based 17bii+ or 42s is that there aren't ARM microcontrollers with sufficient LCD drive capabilities for a passive dot matrix display of the required number of rows and columns. If an ARM microcontroller was used as the main processor, a second chip to drive the display would be required. It could either be a dedicated LCD driver chip, or a non-ARM microcontroller with suitable LCD drive capability.

For a midrange or high-end calculator, the added chip might not pose too much of a cost concern. It's doubtful that an ARM-based 17bii+ would offer enough improvement to justify the cost increase, but a higher-end calculator like a 28S or 42S might.

Note that the Swissmicros DM42 uses a VERY expensive LCD display with integrated electronics on the glass. (It's the same Sharp "memory LCD" that the late Richard Ottosen and I used in our 41 and 42 calculator prototypes.) That's part of why the DM42 is much more expensive than the HP 17bii+.

[ijabbott]

(05-07-2023 05:56 AM)Steve Simpkin Wrote:  

(05-06-2023 12:56 PM)ijabbott Wrote:  ...
I can't see the original Pioneer cases making a comeback, but a 42S CE in the form factor of the silver 17bii+ would be nice.

I can't be 100% sure but the HP 17BII+ *may* be a complete re-write of the HP 17BII functionality without using the original ROM firmware or Saturn emulation. I base this possibility on the Wikipedia entry that claims "The newer 17bII+ (F2234A), introduced in 2007, with Sunplus Technology SPLB31A CPU was developed and is manufactured by Kinpo Electronics." This is a similar to the CPU used for the HP-12C Platinum, HP 33S and HP35S, none of which used Saturn emulation.

If this is the case, it may be difficult to repurpose the HP 17BII+ platform to turn it into a HP-42S. Performance wise, I don't believe the 8-bit SPLB31A would be a good candidate for Saturn emulation.

Yes, you are probably correct that a re-write of the 42S functionality would be needed, which would be a big job and likely to introduce new bugs (which was certainly the case for the 17bii+). Also, the hardware platform is getting pretty old now. If the 17bii+ ever gets ported to a new CPU when the current CPU goes out of production, that may be a good time to think about a new 42S, especially if the new platform could emulate the Saturn at a reasonable speed to reduce the amount that needed to be rewritten.

Quote:Its 4288 bytes of RAM would also not be enough to accomodate a HP-42S emulation and 7.2K Bytes of memory space.

The 17bii+ has 30740 bytes of user memory and some quantity of system memory, so it must be using either the external bus memory interface or the serial (I2C) SRAM interface to interface to some external memory.

[Marco Polo]

(05-08-2023 02:12 PM)ijabbott Wrote:  [quote='Steve Simpkin' pid='172314' dateline='1683438965']
Yes, you are probably correct that a re-write of the 42S functionality would be needed, which would be a big job and likely to introduce new bugs.

Don't forget Free42: the older version basically reproduce 42s features without the more recent improvements.
It might work, if Moravia finds an agreement with the Author.....

[Divasson]

We have here one of the trial samples. We'l try to do a proper unboxing later.

This is how it looks from the outside (see attachments)

The manual looks fantastic. Whoever edited it made a fantastic job. It is thick, too!

A very important advice: both the bezel, keyboard and back plate come protected by a thin film. If it is not removed, it looks like scratched - but it is not!

The cardboard box includes a presentation box within - just like the HP15c LE was. The case looks better than previous ones.

[J-F Garnier]

(05-08-2023 04:02 PM)Divasson Wrote:  We have here one of the trial samples. We'l try to do a proper unboxing later.

Lucky one !

Quote:The manual looks fantastic. Whoever edited it made a fantastic job. It is thick, too!

May the Advanced Functions Handbook available as a real manual too?
I understand it makes sense not to include it in the box (same for the LE),
but if edited in the same way as the OH, I for sure would be ready to buy it for a good price.
It's one of the most valuable manual for who is interested in numeric calculations.

J-F