PRIME TIME

[Han]

(03-09-2016 03:03 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  

(02-20-2016 09:26 PM)manjo Wrote:  Hello all, i'm new here so please bare with me:

New? Yeah, right... you seem the same old manjo to me... (good to see you back in the calculator world!)

(02-20-2016 09:26 PM)manjo Wrote:  I do belive HP Prime is everything we hoped for in almost every way
the only thing i think missing is the "Saturn emulator"
based on 50G compatibility although there are a couple of things which
could make it 2 steps more compatible without performance hit.

In fact i would prefer if there were 2 emulators:
1. is the emulator based on emulator found in 50G and

the other thing would be a step further: let's call it "Saturn virtual machine"
this saturn virtual machine would retain the saturn architecture
(opcodes and code efficiency beauty of original architecture)
but take advantage of new hardvare and extended very much like Saturn+
larger display, virtualy unlimited memory, sound and other hardware.

In fact... Saturn virtual machine could be established as a
multi-platform standard for math and related applications.

A couple of things to think about:
A plain 50g emulator could work, except the physical keyboard would be very different and the screen would have to be re-scaled 2x, but no big deal.
Now for the virtual machine... the Saturn architecture was "maxed out", specifically RAM addressing. You need more bits or some sort of banking (on top of the banking that's already there) to make it work. That alone would cause all kinds of incompatibilities. If TempOb is large, all object pointers will need to be more than 20 bits, which would change their prologs too, which would require a complete ROM rewrite, which would... defeat the purpose of emulation. Do you have any specific ideas on how to extend the Saturn architecture while keeping compatibility?

I imagine that whatever existing ARM code they already have implemented in the 50G would not require too much modification so that it can become an APP on the Prime since that's really all that the Saturn ROM on the 50G is -- an app.

The virtual machine need not actually use all the address space of the Prime (though it would in practical sense be no different from just an emulator).

But if you want to truly use all the new hardware, then I think Claudio is right. You'd be looking at a ROM rewrite.