Gauging interest in a DM48 or DM50?

[c3d]

(10-01-2024 12:46 PM)Jase Wrote:  

(10-01-2024 02:02 AM)polbit Wrote:  I think it has been well established that SwissMicros is unwilling to take on the 48/50 model despite many people asking for it. It is what it is. RPL plight is real...

Relatively new to this forum, so forgive me if my question is obvious, but do we know why SM is unwilling to consider a 48/50 model?

Is it because the owner does not like RPL and prefers RPN?
Is it merely the amount of work, and return on investment?

Thanks for any insight.
Jase.

TL;DR: The SwissMicros standard recipe does not apply, and they got burnt once trying something else.

I'll try to represent them fairly, but I do not speak for them, this comment is only based on earlier discussions with them.

First, SwissMicros does something which is very smart, which is to focus on a specific niche market. Their current niche is HP calculator enthusiasts, and the way they approach it is by building calculators that faithfully emulate existing HP models. While they can improve slightly, e.g. with larger and better screens, running faster, showing multiple stack levels, or including a built-in help viewer, the basic rule is that the existing HP manuals should apply just as well to the corresponding DM model. This goes all the way down to exact placement key and labelling, or simulating printing.

They only deviated once from this philosophy, and I believe they see that as a disaster. They worked with the WP43 team to try and bring a non-HP calculator, albeit one that was clearly "in the spirit of" RPN calculators. Prototypes of the calculator were built, but then there was a dispute. I was not part of that dispute, so I can only report hearsay, but my understanding is that the creator of the WP43 project and the SwissMicros team could not come to an agreement regarding who would own the really impressive user manual. In any case, my impression is that SwissMicros derived all the wrong lessons from that, namely that working with an "external R&D department" was dangerous, and that they'd better stick to the known evils of existing HP calculators.

In my opinion, this clash is the root cause of their current position regarding DB48x, and the rest is just rationalization, but as you can expect, this is rationalization with a pretty solid grain of truth in it.

As you pointed out, moving from emulating RPN calculators to emulating RPL ones is quite a big leap. Part of the problem is what it would mean to be "compatible". To the extent where the HP48, 49 and 50 were routinely programmed in Saturn assembly language, and even grew pretty extensive catalog of games, as well as really sophisticated binaries like the MetaKernel, there is no way you can claim that you deliver a "compatible" calculator if it can't run, among other things, my Lemmings game.

Achieving this level of compatibility can be done. There are several applications that faithfully emulate HP calculators. I have iHP48 and i48 on my iPhone, to just name two, and despite the name, iHP48 at least can emulate the HP50 just as well. However, to reach that level of compatibility, these applications are true hardware emulators, and they require a copy of the HP ROMs. HP has made the ROMs available for download, but under conditions that make it impossible to build a commercial product around it, and also impossible to improve them. This approach will never deliver 34-digit computations like the DM42 does (or variable precision like DB48x does), simply because in order to be compatible, you need to keep the exact same format for numbers, and the HP ROM only has support for 12 and 15 digits numbers if memory serves me right (15-digits being only used for internal calculations).

So this means that SwissMicros cannot, legally, do a faithful DM48, and cannot technically improve over the original. It's possible that they could do a "Buy our calculator and download the ROMs yourself" calculator, but I suspect that would be legally fishy, and again, they would be unable to improve computation precision or the display resolution. The ROM itself would take quite a bit of space, but I think that's not major. They'd have to display 131x80 pixels on their beautiful 400x240 screen, which would be either tiny or ugly. Not to mention that technically, the HP50G hardware supports grayscale, whereas the SwissMicros displays are all strictly black and white. The keyboard would need one more rows of keys (probably not super major, but still more work than changing the key labels). Real compatibility with the HP48 would require two-way infrared, a serial interface and slots for the HP expansion cards (well, they might skip that since they skipped it for the DM41). Real compatibility with the HP50 would imply adding an SD-Card reader, and the ENTER key placement would have to be infinitely wrong, instantly vaporizing their entire fanbase into a never-ending flamewar. And so on.

This is the reason I took a completely different route with DB48x. Despite having a vested interest in binary compatibility myself, I decided that what I really wanted was a better calculator, not some decades-old poor man's Gameboy. As an aside, the reason the HP48 was so exciting for games is that, back then, the Gameboy was a novelty. Not to mention that HP48 games and other programs could be copied through infrared, which explains how my games or the MetaKernel, both written in France, can still be found archived on a US server today. But if you want a portable gaming console today, you probably won't pick the HP48. If you want a high-end calculator on the other hand, it remains quite relevant and hard to improve on. People who install the app on their iPhone don't use it for games, methinks. At least I didn't.

I believe that there is a need for a high-end, efficient, programmable scientific calculator, and that as an engineer, sugar-coated education tools for students, as good as they can be, are not what I need. It's really a shame that the do-not-cheat-during-exams laws forced HP, TI or Casio to choose between engineers/researchers and students. They all chose students for obvious $$$ reasons, and as we all know, this led to calculators that are extremely fancy, with ton of advanced math under the hood, but where a consistent and efficient user interface is thrown away in favor of glitzy "apps".

My own experience with the HP Prime is revealing in that respect. While I have an HP Prime, I can't port DB48x to it because HP had to clamp it down tight to prevent smart students from circumventing the exam mode. So you can't really install your own firmware on it. DB48x on HP50g is more likely than on the HP Prime, which is a shame. The HP Prime keyboard, screen, processor and memory would be fantastic for the project, but presently, the only thing I can run on my HP Prime is the original HP software. I installed the HP Prime app on my iPhone, tested it a few times out of curiosity, but then never actually used it, just like I practically never use my Prime except to check how it deals with this or that math problem. Truth to be told, at least to me, the HP Prime is essentially useless, whereas iHP48 remained quite useful for years. When I needed a computation done, I would pop my iPhone and launch iHP48. That no longer happens as often nowadays, since I typically use DB48x instead.