smaller HP 82166A with 32-pin connector

[Klaus Overhage]

       
I wanted to work through the last 18 pages of http://www.jeffcalc.hp41.eu/divers/files/jpc-15.pdf and stumbled upon the COM program. After the cube it printed the letters ABCDE and fghij in the largest possible font and they were then repeated smaller and smaller. But in the middle of the 6 repetition, with the character size 10 only ABCDE was output and then the printer made a reset and output the rest in text mode as readable graphic commands. This behavior is reproducible and my second X-710 also shows it.

After a long search and a lot of trial and error, I got it: The zero point is set with the command I for the last time when the cube is drawn. Namely where the three dashed lines meet. Actually, the printer only allows a distance of 999 points upwards or downwards from this point, which is approx. 20cm at 0.2mm per point. The continuous output of the large letters in the graphic mode exceeds this limit by far and if it reaches 2048 points, i.e. approx. 40 cm, then it is too much for the printer and it does a reset. So the author of the old article was never able to let his COM program run through in one piece! Maybe he started his experiments with a smaller character size and only set the value to 15 for publication.

The solution is to sprinkle the command I more often. I have expanded line 99 to include it. The original line only contains the letter S entered in alpha mode. If you insert an I and decimal 013 in front of it, which corresponds to the listing in the article after "I|S", then there is no longer a problem and the COM program runs exactly as shown in the article.

At the end of the article it becomes clear that at that time a French company called SCIP sold the printer together with an HP-82166A and an interface between the two. The English translation is attached below. I also wanted to attach the two HP-41 programs COM and CARAC as RAW files, but that is not possible here... (EDIT: unless you put them in an zip-archive!)

My second X-710 is an X-710E, the European version with a slightly different character set. The first attached picture shows the character set of the international X-710 and the second the European X-710E (printed with CARAC). However, you can only see the "X-710E" script on the underside of the printer. The top looks the same for both.