HP-41 and Hepax Filesystem

[pablo2000]

(02-07-2020 07:52 PM)Monte Dalrymple Wrote:  Excellent project! Like Mark, I am interested in the new connector, because I am resorting to cannibalism to get connectors for my Flexible Hardware Module. But I am also interested in the housing, because of the GPS module that I am working on. If you can contact me via email I would like to discuss this more.

Sure thing. I'll email you over the weekend.

(02-07-2020 07:52 PM)Monte Dalrymple Wrote:  There are also some things that you might be able to do to make this more CL-friendly. For example, I'm not sure that the HEPAX automatic relocation plays well with the CL memory management. If you are using a peripheral page address for the serial port it would be nice to coordinate the address with the things I am working on. And depending on how the serial port is done and connected with the USB it might be possible to adapt the CL update process to use that communication path.

We will no doubt chat this further, but just for the sake of a public response for everyone else to see: They play quite nicely together - remember for my own use, I wanted this to use with my CL. Obviously there are some considerations - an IOnix slot has to be empty if it's configured in the CL MMU and vice versa; it's a spectacularly bad idea to have Hepax loaded in both at the same time (unless you like staring at your calculator with the batteries out for an hour!) - but apart from that they're best buddies. I'm sure we could scheme some use cases that would cause problems, but nothing obvious. Normally Hepax will relocate to page 0x7, but if I for example load YFNZ there, Hepax quite happily shifts down to 0x6 or stays at 0x8 (default) if my printer is connected. I've used it with CL configured modules in all slots except 1 (0x8 and 0x9) and the IOnix relocates itself to 0x7 and enables 8k Hepram in those pages. Works no problem. There are (literally) one or two wierdies that have cropped up - I haven't yet decided if they're a 'me' thing (because a fully internal CL-Hepax setup doesn't do it), a 'you' thing (because only the CL has it, not C, CV or CX) or just 'a' thing. Still looking at that.

In any event, the IOnix knows if it's in a CL or not and sets a flag - haven't found a significant use for it yet, but included it 'because I could'. I'm sure we can dream up some use for it, perhaps the update path you mentioned? Or using the IOnix display to show CL configured ROMs along with IOnix ones. As I said, the ROMs were not the principal purpose of the thing, but then not everyone has a CL and there seems to be no real offering at the moment for a multi-rom which works with _any_ '41.