How to make a custom HP-41 rom for the rest of us

[derekamos]

I feel that the "A custom HP-41 rom for the rest of us" concept, is a mighty tall order. How on earth could you get a concensus about the content of a ROM for the rest of us, surely everyone would want their own features! You would end up having to make 2, 6 or even a dozen or more CUSTOM ROMs - just to satisfy the 'selfish' wants of individual minds.

Honestly you might as well leave it all as it is, with people loading roms as they like into a stack they personally agree with. I must say this is what I have done, and being a programmer, I have altered or deleted many programs in roms that I did not need. This proved a long process as I have been at it since the 1980s.

The latest update & change has occurred because of the HP41 emulation on a SMARTPHONE, which wont run HPIL. I chose to use it as the method for 41cv in/output. However now I have updated all my old HPIL output to standard ACA/PRBUF printer output, which on the smartphone emulators is emailable as text. So I am able to get rom blocks of ASCII-HEX text onto my PC to convert & then disassemble using MLDL2k. This process uses all kinds of bit parts, similarly to most others methods, as shown in the above posts. Personally I still use my update of the DAVID assembler rom to do mCode programming, as I find its instant code inputs really efficient.

One thing that stands out in the concept of a custom rom is the use of page 4 as a library of callable routines which comprise the core, always in use subroutines. This however doesn't load as just one custom block rom with the rest, similarly with card reader problem it is hard addressed.

Hence you see the overall multi-split nature of a CUSTOM ROM, as a bit of a paradisical dream.
DA