Stuttgart HP Meeting 2024 (replacement Allschwil)

[AnnoyedOne]

(10-09-2024 05:22 PM)vaklaff Wrote:  Contrary to popular belief...

It seemed to be when I lived there decades ago. Perhaps a regional (Bavarian) thing. And I did my fair share to "help out"! There was a brewery (Weissbier) very near to where I was living. I could see and smell it.

As someone once said "I retired and became a chemical engineer. Now I convert beer into urine."

A1

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(10-09-2024 05:22 PM)vaklaff Wrote:  Contrary to popular belief, Germany is not a beer country. Or if it is, then no more than e.g. Spain.

As a matter of fact I am originally from Munich and should have been raised with beer instead of milk...

But the only time I ever drank beer from a one-liter Glass was really in Spain :-) We had a night stop in Barcelona and between checking into the hotel and looking for a place to have our evening meal my colleague and I stopped at some place for a beer. The waiter recognised us as germans and without asking brought us the largest glasses of beer that he could find... Luckily we didn't have an early take-off the next morning so we could enjoy them.

And I was one of the lucky few (few = 800.000) people who got tickets for one of Adele's concerts in Munich this summer. During her performance she showed her audience how you drink in style: From one litre beer mugs. Unfortunately I missed the opportunity to buy one of these "Adele in Munich"-mugs because now they fetch prices similar to an HP-67 with working card reader.

And on topic: As I wrote on another thread, I have my gear for flashing/repurposing HP-20b, HP-30b and HP-15C CE calculators up and running. And I ordered some extra sheets of keyboard stickers for WP34s and WP31s calculators which I already received in record time from the US.

Regards
Max

(The screen at Adele's concert was the largest outdoor screen ever built: 220x30m or 6.600 square meters - my HP-15C does not have enough digits to show how many times it's own screen would fit inside the large one ;-) )

[floppy]

(10-09-2024 06:03 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  I have my gear for flashing/repurposing HP-20b, HP-30b and HP-15C CE calculators up and running. And I ordered some extra sheets of keyboard stickers for WP34s and WP31s calculators which I already received in record time from the US.

So, we will define the time on site, to reprogram and drink beers in Stuttgart (FIRST reprogram THEN drink beers).

[AnnoyedOne]

(10-09-2024 06:03 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  ..I am originally from Munich...

Max,

I lived NE of Munich and went there often via train. Near the "new" Munich airport (it was in Reim when I was there). And yes I've drunk beer from 1L mugs More than once! As I recall we drank Wiessbier at lunch too.

(10-09-2024 06:09 PM)floppy Wrote:  ...reprogram and drink beers in Stuttgart...

Isn't Stuttgart in Bavaria? It was when I was there.

A1

PS: My apologies to the residents of Stuttgart. It is in Baden-Württemberg not Bayern! They do drink beer though! I blame beer for my error

[cdmackay]

(10-09-2024 05:22 PM)vaklaff Wrote:  Contrary to popular belief, Germany is not a beer country.

I'm not sure that coming as high as 7th out of 35 countries allows that conclusion

Merely that you're not quite as thirsty as Czech, etc…

I'm astonished that we (UK) are only 27th. I will see what I can do about that. If they split out Scotland, I'm sure we'd do better.

[floppy]

(10-10-2024 04:14 PM)cdmackay Wrote:  I'm astonished that we (UK) are only 27th. I will see what I can do about that. If they split out Scotland, I'm sure we'd do better.

I see already a lot of brits working heavily on that topic: drinking beers on the beach in EU and with massive presence in the beer festival in Stuttgart. Keep going: the positioning on the list has to be better (we trust in the brits for this; and by the way for good engineering). Conclusion: Stuttgart is a nice place for the British citizen to gain a better positioning in beer list and HP engineering reputation.

Remark: the Czech and others should be carefully not to loose the competition.. ;-)

[cdmackay]

I have sampled the beer in Minga, but never in Stuttgart. I'll try to rectify that.

[AnnoyedOne]

(10-11-2024 05:04 PM)cdmackay Wrote:  I have sampled the beer in Minga, but never in Stuttgart.

Remember: work/programming first and beer second. Get the order wrong and...

A1

[vaklaff]

(10-10-2024 04:14 PM)cdmackay Wrote:  

(10-09-2024 05:22 PM)vaklaff Wrote:  Contrary to popular belief, Germany is not a beer country.

I'm not sure that coming as high as 7th out of 35 countries allows that conclusion

Merely that you're not quite as thirsty as Czech, etc…

FWIW, I am a Czech…

[cdmackay]

(10-12-2024 05:25 PM)vaklaff Wrote:  

(10-10-2024 04:14 PM)cdmackay Wrote:  I'm not sure that coming as high as 7th out of 35 countries allows that conclusion

Merely that you're not quite as thirsty as Czech, etc…

FWIW, I am a Czech…

Apologies for the mixup; and congratulations on your country's first place

[c3d]

This will be the first time I present to this particular forum. In order to calibrate my presentation of DB48X, I am curious what the expectations are regarding duration. I think that I need at least 20 minutes, but I could easily go for much longer.

[floppy]

I made a prognostic of presentation time and all the available time for the 2 days. See the first post.
Looks like the available time is not tight so far; we should show hardware when the presentations are done.
However, we will review the agenda in the morning together then finalize it for the 2 days (and subject to adjustment: museum visit timing, lunch and dinner events, ROM dump event..).
I would not dare to define a rigid time frame on my own: just make a 2h presentation if you think the topic will have a big interest. Or less.

[Dave Frederickson]

(07-18-2024 12:13 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  To copy the ERPOM contents all you need (along with the Pil-Box and IL-Per) is the ROMCOPY LEX file which will let you copy the entire ROM image to a single file in a single command.

ROMCOPY may alter the checksum. Depending on the size of the image, ROM and EPROM checksums may be in different memory locations. The dump routine in the Emu71 manual provides a correct dump.

[rprosperi]

(10-21-2024 05:27 AM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  

(07-18-2024 12:13 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  To copy the ERPOM contents all you need (along with the Pil-Box and IL-Per) is the ROMCOPY LEX file which will let you copy the entire ROM image to a single file in a single command.

ROMCOPY may alter the checksum. Depending on the size of the image, ROM and EPROM checksums may be in different memory locations. The dump routine in the Emu71 manual provides a correct dump.

An ongoing topic with different views... lol

A. Dave feels preserving checksums, which aren't used by anything, is important, and extra effort is justified to do so.

B. Bob feels preserving checksums, which aren't used by anything, is not important, and can be safely ignored, saving time and energy to ridicule class A. believers.

I suspect most h/w oriented folks are type A and s/w oriented (and lazy) folks are type B, but 've not conducted research to verify this.

[AnnoyedOne]

In my experience software/engineers/programmers/computer scientists assume a machine with infinite speed and memory. With 64-bit CPU's, gigabytes of RAM, etc. large programs simply aren't an issue anymore. For those of use who've programmed 8051 type SoC's with 128 bytes of RAM, or less, limitations are a challenge to be overcome

IMHO checksums can be useful if they're actually validated by comparison to a known value or by a human. Otherwise "why bother"?

In the 1980's processors were slow and LRC (aka XOR type), simple addition etc, checksums were the norm. Reasonably fast but although the coverage wasn't great they caught most simple errors. In those days ROM/EPROM/etc weren't as reliable as they are now so they served a purpose. Reset on any error and try again.

By the 1990's I'd moved to 16-bit CRC's. Better coverage but slower to calculate. In my case 1-2 secs which was acceptable.

Before I retired I used two 32-bit CRC's on firmware images. Downloadable so one covered the "header", which indicated a valid firmware image before erasing the old version, while the other was over the firmware itself (to validate memory reprogramming). [The latter was also checked, by the bootloader, after reset.]

Then there's the "human" type like on my HP-20S. Enter a program and a checksum is shown at the end so a user can check for entry mistakes. Those may also be useful during product manufacture and/or an end-user for firmware validation.

A1

[Dave Frederickson]

(10-21-2024 12:25 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  

(10-21-2024 05:27 AM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  ROMCOPY may alter the checksum. Depending on the size of the image, ROM and EPROM checksums may be in different memory locations. The dump routine in the Emu71 manual provides a correct dump.

An ongoing topic with different views... lol

A. Dave feels preserving checksums, which aren't used by anything, is important, and extra effort is justified to do so.

B. Bob feels preserving checksums, which aren't used by anything, is not important, and can be safely ignored, saving time and energy to ridicule class A. believers.

I suspect most h/w oriented folks are type A and s/w oriented (and lazy) folks are type B, but 've not conducted research to verify this.

Then there's type C, like HP, who identified the Finance ROM as an IRAM and not a ROM. How should this ROM image be archived?

Checksums are used by the Diagnostic ROM and the CMTTOOLS.

ROMCOPY's purpose is to generate checksums. If checksums aren't important when copying EPROMS then use EPRMCOPY instead which won't insert checksums where they don't belong.

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(10-21-2024 12:25 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  I suspect most h/w oriented folks are type A and s/w oriented (and lazy) folks are type B, but 've not conducted research to verify this.

For your statistics: I am more of type A (hardware oriented) but couldn't care less about checksums because I am too lazy to to type programs into calculators (*). And if I do the programming myself I don't need a checksum either...

Regards
Max

(*) In the 1980ies we spent entire nights typing pages and pages of hexcodes from magazines into our home computers only to find out that the game we just entered is really not worth playing... Never again!

[floppy]

JanS brought up the ROM topic; which is still unclear for me.
How to make this working? can I receive a recipe prior the meeting?
a) EPRMCOPY is a BASIC program to be found where?
b) when an unknown module is connected in the front, how to dump its content? in an ILPER window? how? (probably its start and end-address must be identified.. how? then a command has to include these parameters)
c) when the content is dumped, how to see a readable content? ie how to transform the HEX from the dump in the BASIC commands or ASM mnemonics?
I would like to avoid such discussions in Stuttgart (in case the specialists are not there) but try to achieve straight a readable version of a ROM content.

[Dave Frederickson]

(10-21-2024 03:37 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  I am more of type A (hardware oriented) but couldn't care less about checksums ...

I'm also H/W oriented and I care about checksums because they let me know if the EPROM has failed and contains bad data.

[Dave Frederickson]

(10-21-2024 03:42 PM)floppy Wrote:  JanS brought up the ROM topic; which is still unclear for me.
How to make this working? can I receive a recipe prior the meeting?
a) EPRMCOPY is a BASIC program to be found where?
b) when an unknown module is connected in the front, how to dump its content? in an ILPER window? how? (probably its start and end-address must be identified.. how? then a command has to include these parameters)
c) when the content is dumped, how to see a readable content? ie how to transform the HEX from the dump in the BASIC commands or ASM mnemonics?
I would like to avoid such discussions in Stuttgart (in case the specialists are not there) but try to achieve straight a readable version of a ROM content.

a) EPRMCOPY is a LEX file, like ROMCOPY. CLONE is a BASIC program for copying EPROMs. EPRMCOPY can be found in the HP-71B Compendium.
https://www.hhcworld.com/files/HP71COMPE...TTOOLS.zip
b) The method that produces an exact copy is to use the DUMP routine.
c) The ASCII dump is copied to a text file and converted to binary using DMP2BIN. The dump can then be verified using TITANCHK if it's a ROM image. See the Emu71 manual.