ACT available

[PANAMATIK]

ACT Update available!

I needed some more days than promised to finish the update Rev. 1.04, which I announced already for end of may. For anyone, who was interested in the new Revision, at least I was able to publish the new ACT 1.04 manual since last week. perhaps you may have read the new chapters and about the new features.

The main steps forward are infrared printing and fast program execution. But there are also some minor improvements, which you can discover by yourself step by step.

Still I cannot be sure, whether I tested every function in any possible constellation for all calculators, but I tried my best. At least I verified, that the same boot loader, that I delivered in all ACTs since January is working correctly. Since I designed it, that it cannot overwrite itself to prevent any data corruption, it would have been very uncomfortable, if I had found some bug later. Fortunately I didn't find a bug. In my tests all update procedures never failed and even transmitting errors or interruptions will not brick your ACT.

But I have to confess, that there is one minor compatibility problem left. If you update your new ACT to Rev 1.04, its serial number will be reset to 00000. Unfortunately I couldn't avoid this problem. I choose a wrong location for the serial number in the previous version. But I can resolve it, I will send everybody, who performs an update, an additional file, which restores his serial number. Further updates (if any) will not have any problems and the serial number will be preserved.

You can download the new ACT Revision as .zip file from my website. It contains all update versions for HP21E to HP-29E and the actupdate.exe program.

http://www.panamatik.de/actupdate.ZIP

Now everybody is free to upgrade to Rev 1.04 and can use infrared printing, if one modifies the ACT according to the instructions in the manual. Alternatively I offer to do the infrared printing modifications for you, if you order the infrared ACT version and don't want to do it by yourself. Please ask by PM.

I need to mention: When you update your ACT with the above standard update files, your user programs, constants and register sets will be cleared and you have to type them in again. However if you don't change the calculator model, it is possible to preserve your programs and registers. In this case ask for an appropriate update file, that only updates the firmware and leaves the user area untouched. When switching from HP-25E to HP-29E etc. or vice versa the programs and registers have to be cleared, because the data structures are not compatible.

There are more than twenty repairs made now and all of them went successful. I hope this series will keep going.

Thank you very much for all your positive response, that I received.

Bernhard