HP 12c Platinum 25th Anniversary Limited Edition Hardwood Box Set

[AnnoyedOne]

(08-20-2024 11:03 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  The HP-12CP Prestige was manufactured in, and officially was sold only in Brazil...

The photo on this page shows one new in a sealed plastic package. The text doesn't seem to be in English. Brazillian Portugese?

http://www.hp-collection.org/calculators/12cpr.html

(08-21-2024 11:04 PM)dm319 Wrote:  Is this a fake so good it is being sold on official channels?

Could be fake hardware/firmware/packaging. I have personally reverse engineered the first two in my career as an EE. Or defective CPU/ROM parts (i.e. chips). Some Chinese factories are/were known to do this kind of thing (on the side or not). I once heard a coworker complain about "knock off" product from China that he'd personally seen. As I recall he was able to suck the firmware from a unit and determine that it was fake. Personally I view products made in China as suspect. If one buys from a trustworthy source it's probably genuine. Caveat emptor!

It is possible that a manufacturer/distributor receives fake product that looks genuine. I've seen it happen. I've seen suspect components used as well. It can be very hard to detect but "outsourcing" is a thing nowadays so some ignore the potential consequences. How do you know you that you have purchased genuine product? You often don't for sure. Unlikely but it happens.

Copying embedded ROMs requires special equipment and knowledge but it can be done. Extracting images from flash devices often isn't as hard. I'm surprised that newer HP-12C and HP-15C firmware images are seemingly "in the clear". Perhaps because anyone with Atmels' SAM-BA can dump it anyway. That makes it easy to reverse engineer.

I deliberately obfuscated downloadable firmware images for a product I developed (I wrote the bootloader as well). The method was pretty simple so as to be small/fast but was undocumented. I also wrote a PC program to "encode" the firmware image before releasing it. Only intended to stop simple hacking. Anyone with a JTAG programmer could suck the actual firmware anyway (I've personally done it).

A1