FPGA Based Open Calculator Platform

[David Hayden]

I think we should move away from emulating or re-implementing the HP processors. The problem is that they're just too limited by today's standards. The Saturn has a 20-bit address space addressing ~1 million nibbles, or 512Kbytes. You just can't do much in that space and the HP calculators themselves jump through hoops to get around the limitation.

I think we're better off writing calculator software with modern languages for modern processors, like free-42, DM32, and newRPL. These are all smoking fast.

As for a hardware platform, we seem to be nearly there with the swiss micros platform. Face plate overlays are already possible, so the only real impediment I see is the keys themselves. I don't think If there were a way to make reasonably priced keys then we could use that platform for whatever calculator we wanted. Of course it would have to work with the number and layout of the existing keys, but that seems like a small price to pay.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Dave