Third-party firmware PoC...

[Claudio L.]

(07-07-2014 01:01 PM)cutterjohn Wrote:  Parisse even deigned to make a few replies, more or less along the lines of I can't tell you much about how the proprietary firmware works, but I can probably drop hints to help hacking, or so I read it.

[EDIT]
Seems like omnimaga's down ATM, but this SHOULD be the link to the thread:
http://www.omnimaga.org/hp-prime/let%27s...rime!/210/
[/EDIT]

I just read that thread, I didn't see Bernard Parisse making any posts, though. But Cyrille did (unless they secretly are half-brothers, Cyrille's last name is not Parisse). It's funny to see how they refer to Cyrille (quoted from the moderator):

Quote:To be honest I am unsure, since he is posting in this particular thread and the HP staff can't really help us hack their own products, but we never know, since TI-Planet and MoHPC have an HP guy named Cyrille.

The "HP staff" has collaborated with the HP community for a very long time, even before they became "HP Staff".
If I remember correctly, it was Cyrille who published the grayscale demo showing how to execute ARM code in the 49G+, which opened the door for the development of hpgcc and hpgcc3.
So, to our fellows from Omnimaga: Yes, you should listen to the "guy named Cyrille", if he offered to help you hack the calc, you better take his advice.

In any case, total firmware replacement is tough, it will be a while before something useful can be made with this. It would've been better to provide some kind of hook to add custom functions (apps?) to the existing firmware, much like the HP 50g had hidden opcodes to call arbitrary ARM code from within the emulated environment. But since that would get the Prime banned from all exams... I don't think it will ever happen.

This opens the door for somebody to create a custom firmware, and we happen to be creating one. The Prime hardware could be an excellent target for newRPL to run on, but for now I think we'll stick with the 50g platform for the time being. If by the time newRPL is released, there's more information and low-level drivers done for the Prime hardware, then we might attempt to port newRPL to it.

Claudio