[VA] A digression around a digression

[J-F Garnier]

(11-28-2022 07:05 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  

What's a real HP-71B, anyway ?

[...]
The "soul" of the HP-71B, its essence, what actually makes an HP-71B be an HP-71B, is its original, immaterial software, the contents of its System ROMs, which define everything it does and how it behaves.
[...]
In short: the software is what matters the most, and any device physical or virtual using the HP-71B's System ROMs' contents to accurately implement the HP-71B functionality is as real an HP-71B as the physical original is [...].

Valentin, you couldn't have expressed my thought better !
When I'm programming on a HP-71B emulator, I do program in HP-71B BASIC, I'm really programming a HP-71B.


Now, for more practical aspects:

(11-28-2022 07:05 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  In the past I used very extensively J-F Garnier's Emu71/DOS, which is a marvel to behold, and it ran at 240x on my now defunct ~20 yo XP system.

Once it passed away I had to use another emulator (as J-F made it clear to me in no uncertain terms that he didn't plan to release a 32- or 64-bit version of Emu71/DOS any time soon, if ever,) and eventually I was saddled with an insufferably buggy one which was supossed to run at 128x but barely achieved 64x, i.e. 3 times slower than Emu71/DOS and boy, did I miss the 3x-faster speed ! .

First, as I already told you (too many times?), there is already an excellent HP-71B emulator for Windows. Even if it doesn't provide the same integrated environment as Emu71/DOS does, I never understood your reluctance to use it, and your preference for a poorer environment.

My usual HP-71B programming environment is Emu71/DOS running inside DOSBox for its ease of use, it provides me about 10x speed relative to the HP-71B, which is enough for many purposes. This is what HP could have provided with a 8MHz Saturn HP-71B, so still in line with the spirit of HP vintage machines.
When I really need faster speed, I then transfer the program to Emu71/Win very easily using a common disc image.
In the past I also tried Emu71/DOS inside VirtualBox running DOS that gives the native Emu71/DOS performance, but the file sharing is much less easy.

J-F