[HN Gopher] Calculators now emulated at Internet Archive
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Calculators now emulated at Internet Archive
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 263 points
Date : 2023-01-29 08:40 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.archive.org)
| notpushkin wrote:
| When I was a child, I've had a Elektronika MK-61. [0] Not a
| graphing calculator, but it could be programmed. My father wrote
| some simple game for it (I think it was Bulls and Cows). I wanted
| to port Heroes of Might and Magic, not realizing that it's way
| too ambitious :-)
|
| Here's an online emulator you can play around with:
| http://mk-61.moy.su/emulator.html
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-61
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I bought one recently on eBay from a seller in Ukraine (despite
| the war, shipping is still up- from Kiev at least). I also
| bought its brother, an MK-52.
|
| These calculators are interesting:
|
| Extremely slow: inverse sin takes ~3 seconds.
|
| Dead keyboard: they use foam for the key spring so there is
| almost no action. The plastic keys touch membrane contacts.
|
| Leading digits are required before the decimal point: .5 is not
| allowed, you have to enter 0.5.
|
| The result is only printed in scientific notation: so 1 / 5
| gives 2e-1
|
| MK-52: has non-volatile memory. You transfer between RAM and
| EEPROM via some extra functions.
|
| Even with all these limitations, they are nice RPN programmable
| calculators with vacuum fluorescent displays. It's cool that
| they are made with an independent (from the rest of the world)
| electronics fabrication system.
|
| Like Soviet radios, you get a copy of the schematics along with
| the calculator.
|
| To get an idea, here are translations of the Cyrillic keys:
|
| https://www.thimet.de/CalcCollection/Calculators/Elektronika...
| whoisthisguy wrote:
| TI-89 basically saved my ass in collage. Not only that, I was the
| fourth "best student" in collage based on grade average. I modded
| the firmware so I was able to upload text docs organised in
| folders. Text filed had TOC, that made navigation easier. I was
| also able to search within those files.
|
| If you became fluent using all features of TI-89 (integration,
| derivation, diff. eqs., shortcut keys etc.) and you had a solid
| abstract understanding of the subject (which of course required
| some studying), TI-89 basically got the rest of the job done in
| minutes. TI-89 was magic.
| lambdaxymox wrote:
| I had a TI-89 I got in 9th grade and had through the end of
| college, but I found I had the opposite experience with it. A
| goodly number of my engineering classmates used their TI-89s as
| a crutch and forgot most of the details of solving e.g.
| differential equations and computing integrals. In my case I
| found it faster to do most of the problem solving by hand, and
| I just used the calculator to punch in the numbers to get the
| final answer. I found after a while that my TI-89 just sat in
| my backpack doing nothing most of the time and all I needed was
| a scientific calculator for most things. About the only time I
| found it really useful was for solving for stability
| characteristics and tuning tedious PID loops for control
| systems problems. Solving characteristic polynomials for poles
| and zeros was just a pain in the neck.
|
| It had a nice side effect of saving my bacon several times on
| final exams. On my engineering electromagnetics final I forgot
| to change the batteries in my TI-89 the night before and the
| calculator didn't work. I ended up having to re-derive a small
| bit of transmission line theory from scratch in order to solve
| the problems. I somehow managed to be one of the first people
| done anyway. I did have fun making arcade game clones and
| custom boot screens in assembly on it though.
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| And here I thought calculators are not suited for artistic
| pursuits.
| varrock wrote:
| Can you further expand on uploading text docs? I'm not sure I
| understand why that helped you. Also, what did you get your
| degree in?
| codetrotter wrote:
| I'm wondering too. I remember when I was in HS, one of my
| teachers said that they could easily spot if anyone was
| cheating with their calculators because almost all of the
| students that were not cheating would be focused on reading
| and writing by hand most of the time, and only occasionally
| reach for their calculator to calculate something with it. If
| someone was paying an abnormal amount of attention to their
| calculator, it could indicate that they had for example put
| notes on the calculator, or had some extra programs that had
| features outside of the allowed ones. So then the teacher
| might sneak up behind the student and have a glance at what
| they were doing on the calculator.
|
| Also, to try and combat those kinds of things my school
| always had us show them the list of programs on our TI-84
| Plus calculators before a test started, and we had to delete
| anything outside of what was allowed. That being said I think
| the calculator can be modded with custom things that could be
| hidden. So probably the best way of preventing people from
| cheating was by paying attention to who was using the
| calculator too much.
| realo wrote:
| The best way to prevent cheating is to forbid all
| calculators during the exam ...
| whoisthisguy wrote:
| I was majoring in CS in one collage and doing Business
| Management in another collage. Both had class that required
| us to memorise tons of lexical knowledge. For example I had
| two semesters of Corporate Finances. Lot of formulas (100+)
| had to be remembered to calculate different KPIs a
| corporation. I had all these formulas in a notes uploaded to
| the calculator. If a test questions required one to use, I
| opened up my notes, looked up the formula and used it. TI-89
| was able to use variables, solve equations for different
| variables and convert units. Using the right shortcuts I just
| plugged in the numbers. Of course I understood how to apply
| these formulas, I just didn't have the patience to memorise
| them. Another class was Psychology. Had to memorise a
| complete book. No way I would do that. Instead collected
| notes from friends, organised them, digitised them, created
| well structured Table of Contents (all took about two days),
| uploaded to the calculator and used it during tests. You
| might ask why it was allowed to use a calculator during a
| Psychology final test? Answer is easy. At those times no
| teacher could image that notes could be stored in a
| calculator. TI-89 was just released, hardy available in the
| EU. So if they saw me playing with the calculator they
| thought probably the kiddo doesn't know anything and just
| pushes buttons to spend time.
| warning26 wrote:
| tl;dr cheating on exams
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| jb1991 wrote:
| even all these years later, despite that I have all these
| computing devices around me, I still feel like a kid in the candy
| store when I look at this. I was growing up in Mexico and very
| very occasionally I would see a kid with one of these old-school
| graphing calculators and just be super jealous. I did not get a
| chance to actually use one until I was an adult
| ilyt wrote:
| I eventually just bought a modern clone from
| https://www.swissmicros.com/products
|
| It even works with original printer. That for some reason still
| had replacement printer heads available in ~2018 and I managed
| to fix it.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Anyone else remember playing a port of the arcade game Phoenix on
| their TI-84 plus?
|
| Almost everyone at my HS got it through a sneakernet of seniors.
| dharmab wrote:
| Heck, I had an entire Final Fantasy fangame on mine. And an OS
| with file browser and GUI.
| chacha21 wrote:
| Desktop calculators are the best. Shame on computers !
|
| https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/article/chalk.html#toc-14
| wcfields wrote:
| I'm here for the games, possible to have a fully loaded one with
| ti-calc.org conenction?
| krab wrote:
| What does it mean that it's an "Access-restricted-item"? For
| example TI-81 https://archive.org/details/ti81-calculator
| textfiles wrote:
| Modifications done to make it run in the browser make it
| historically / archivally problemstic, so it's restricting
| downloads. There is nothing related to these calculators not
| available in other locations on or offf the archive.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Works for me.
| winterqt wrote:
| I presume that it's stream-only, as in it can't be downloaded
| with a button. (Now, if that means that you can't grab whatever
| it's downloading by inspecting the requests, that's a different
| story.)
| Narishma wrote:
| Is there a reason they only have graphing calculators?
| textfiles wrote:
| I only added the calculators that have the artwork setting.
| Otherwise you look at a single line or LCD. The blog post
| discusses this.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| My beloved TI-85 is there and brings back so many memories. It
| served me well all those years at the university and then some.
| It's screen is somewhat broken, so it's good that we have an easy
| way to emulate it.
| travbrack wrote:
| I had one too. I guess I did math on it, but I remember much
| more clearly downloading games to it via the graph link cable.
| I spent hours playing Tetris in math class.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Yes, the exchange of games and other programs was something
| that gave fame to this series of calculators. I also remember
| we had a fake program emulating the reset so we could avoid
| having our TIs wiped by the exam supervisor. Not proud of it,
| but I had a few formulas/macros on many exams :-)
| chx wrote:
| Where do I report a bug? There's no such thing as a HP48GP. It
| seems that's a HP48G+
|
| That calculator, even thirty years later is close to my heart. As
| far as I can remember, it was my first Internet purchase lightly
| used -- I was still in Hungary and I bought it from the USA --
| and then we stacked four SRAM ICs on top of each other with most
| legs simple melted together vertically except for the select
| ones. Hand soldering SMT parts, yay -- a buddy did it, I am not
| crafty enough for that. In essence it became a much more
| expensive 48GX without the expansion slot. Dave Arnett himself
| was participating in these conversations, back then, which blew
| my mind.
| https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.hp48/c/CS0lTpKkBHw/m/vn...
| db48x wrote:
| I remember thinking about upgrading my HP48G when I was in high
| school. In the end I saved up and bought the HP48GX plus a
| calculus expansion card instead. That came in handy for the
| Calculus and Physics classes I had that year.
|
| The funniest thing I ever did back then was to hook up the
| serial port to a 1200 baud modem with lots of big red
| blinkenlights. I found a simple terminal emulator program and
| used it to dial out to the county public library system, which
| offered free email addresses. Once I got it working, I
| carefully coiled up my custom serial cable and a phone cord of
| sufficient length in a plastic bag and took them to school with
| me. Just before lunch near the end of calculus class I quietly
| got up and strung the cable across the room to a phone jack.
| Then I went back to my desk, typed in the AT command to start
| dialing, and grinned as the screech of the modem brought the
| lecture to an early conclusion. Of course my teacher was
| annoyed, but even he had join the laughter when I told him that
| I was just checking my email.
|
| Even funnier if you knew that I spent most of my lunch hours
| either in my Physics teacher's classroom playing spades (he
| taught the Calculus class right after lunch, which was
| convenient), or in the library where they had some terminals
| plugged into the card catalog system. You could break out of
| their telnet session and then telnet to wherever you wanted, so
| I often spent my lunch hour by checking my email (and then
| logging into a bulletin board to play the door games), so the
| modem wasn't actually necessary.
|
| Incidentally, I changed the title on
| https://archive.org/details/hp48gp-calculator to "HP48G+", as
| you suggested. Changing the identifier is a rather more fraught
| process akin to deleting the item and reuploading it, so I'll
| let it be. And I bet the MAME driver is named "hp48gp", so it's
| fine.
| chx wrote:
| Now that you mention, I made a serial cable out of a CD audio
| cable, it was using the same connector just needed a DB9
| soldered on the cut off end...
|
| Thanks for upgrading the title.
| db48x wrote:
| You're welcome.
|
| Now that you mention it, I don't recall where I sourced the
| connector for the serial port. There was nothing unusual
| about it the connector, but I no longer remember that
| detail; oh well.
| znpy wrote:
| > here's no such thing as a HP48GP.
|
| maybe the P is for "plus"
| czx4f4bd wrote:
| Indeed, if you search for "HP48GP", you'll find a few sites
| offering the ROM in a file named hp48gp.zip. I suspect that's
| the source of the mistake.
| zrkrlc wrote:
| Got my HP50g in my last year of uni (physics) and I only wish
| I'd learned to depend on it sooner. Would have been fun
| figuring out calculus wizardry with a lisp-like language from
| the get-go.
| anthk wrote:
| I think there are free as in freedom ROMs for TI and HP
| calculators out there.
| marethyu wrote:
| Wondering if all these emulators are open sourced
| textfiles wrote:
| Yes.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| My understanding is this is all done using MAME all of which is
| open source. Is this incorrect?
| [deleted]
| guerrilla wrote:
| It looks like MAME is emulating the hardware but where do the
| ROMs come from?
| db48x wrote:
| Copied right out of the original rom chips; where else?
| guerrilla wrote:
| They could have rewritten them themselves or just
| emulated them is where else. If they are just imaged from
| the original ROM chips, then is it legal to host them
| here and if so why? Is it not piracy or do they have
| permission or even cooperation, e.g. from TI? Or has
| their copyright (not sure if that's the right concept
| here) expired?
| db48x wrote:
| Lol, of course there's no cooperation from the copyright
| holders; that would cost real money and generate no
| revenue. And the copyright, as usual for works created in
| the US, lasts for the lifetime of the author plus 70
| years. These things won't be out of copyright for at
| least a century, so piracy is the only option.
|
| If the copyright holders complain, IA will make the
| complained-about items dark. That means nobody can see
| them, though without actually losing any of the files or
| metadata. If anyone remembers the dark calculators a
| century from now, someone at IA will be able to reverse
| the decision and make them available to the public again.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > that would cost real money and generate no revenue.
|
| This isn't necessarily true. In fact, it could be the
| opposite. It may be very good PR for them and could cost
| as little as some board meetings and some lawyers' time.
| lupire wrote:
| The don't want to encourage undermining their school
| calculator sales scam in any way.
| db48x wrote:
| Tens of thousands in cost for $0 revenue. You can't
| measure good will, and probably only a few hundred people
| would even notice. HP's advertising department doesn't
| get out of bed unless they're doing a television
| commercial to be seen by a million people or more. That
| means printers, not 40 year old calculators.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I don't know why you have your head stuck in a rock.
| Corporations spend trillions on good PR and they have a
| plethora of ways to measure how they profit from it.
| "Good will" _is_ branding and advertising.
| db48x wrote:
| Yet somehow they never ever help emulators. Nintendo
| actively hunts down sources of roms and destroys them,
| year after year. For every game they've ever made, even
| for games you've never heard of (all except that one
| single game that they licensed to someone else 40 years
| ago). EA kills off a few games every year, and those are
| usually just a few years old and still have players. A
| company called Atlus sued its own fans when they created
| a server emulator for an MMO that Atlus was shutting down
| (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS6oBjK8AwQ>). Software
| companies just do not care about the good will of their
| own customers.
| schneems wrote:
| Same question. I would like to see the code.
|
| The 89 is quite a feat of engineering and can do stuff like
| simplifying algebraic equations on the fly.
|
| I always wanted something like a cross between the 89 and a
| spreadsheet where I could see my math represented as an
| algebraic formula to double check that everything was wired
| up.
|
| I've always wondered how all of it worked inside the 89
| Gigachad wrote:
| IA seems to host a whole lot of copyrighted content.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Library!
| gigagigachad wrote:
| Nice username!
| theragra wrote:
| If i remember correctly, they lean on either agreements with
| rights holders or the fair use doctrine. Sometimes going as
| far as to the court.
| philistine wrote:
| I taught myself programming on a TI-81 by making a blackjack
| game. I'm not a programmer by trade, but a hobbyist. Still,
| turning on that 81 and inputting a GOTO brought back memories.
| tombert wrote:
| That was sort of my intro to programming as well, though
| decidedly less cool than a game.
|
| I got really tired of typing out my physics equations by hand,
| and I was also bad at memorizing them for physics class, so I
| decided to cheat and write a program for the calculator that
| basically "plugged in" a lot of the equations for me.
|
| It ended up being debateably useful, but honestly the act of
| writing the programs ended up actually being a reasonably good
| way for me to learn the equations anyway, so I kept it up
| throughout high school as a form of studying.
| progman32 wrote:
| I loved writing programs like that during tests, really saved
| time for common operations. I was also very prone to
| mechanical errors so this saved me from that too. It was
| often easier in a multiple choice question to just have the
| calculator brute force the answers while I worked on the next
| problem. Totally permitted usage.
| Thorentis wrote:
| This was the first I'd heard of the IA hosting emulations, and
| the first time heating of MAME. Incredible! Thinking about it
| now, it makes perfect sense. What's the point in archiving all
| this vintage software if you can't run it? Archiving emulations
| of eg consoles and having open spruce software to run the
| emulations is the perfect solution. Wonderful work by IA as
| usual.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| See also: "Calculator forensics"
| https://www.rskey.org/~mwsebastian/miscprj/forensics.htm
|
| A fast way of identifying calculators that have identical
| internal math, and a crude way of judging their quality.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That is damn cool.
| implements wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/hp48gx-calculator
|
| - is also available as a free iOS app:
|
| https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/ihp48/id1549608953
|
| - the latter seemingly well regarded by the HP calculator
| enthusiasts at:
|
| https://forum.swissmicros.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2836
| tombert wrote:
| I use iHP48 as my default calculator app on my iPhone, and I do
| really like it, but it's a little irritating too, the main
| problem being that you have to be very slow and deliberate when
| typing out numbers. If you type numbers too fast it will likely
| drop a few. This isn't a problem most of the time, but I find
| it's an issue when I need to have multiple of the same digit
| (e.g. multiplying by 1000).
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Is it just me or is the 49g not working?
| lenjao wrote:
| Same for me unfortunately
| gwhl wrote:
| It boots in the No-ROM-found mode.
|
| Funnily I updated the ROMs of 2 HP 49g this weekend through
| that exact screen.
| pjmlp wrote:
| No CASIOs :\
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| MAME also emulates at least one CASIO calculator (CFX-9850G).
| chongli wrote:
| Ahhh too bad. My current favourite calculator is a $10 CASIO
| fx-260 Solar II. It's really compact, it doesn't use VPAM, it's
| really simple to use (no menus to navigate or anything like
| that).
| mikewarot wrote:
| I really like the $10 white Casio solar I got at CVS. It does
| a really good job with degrees/minutes/seconds which came in
| handy when doing gear setups.
| pcmoore wrote:
| What's a good simple calculator for programmers? Easy
| entry/conversion of hex and binary but simple arithmetic with
| possible shifts. I don't need to do trigonometry.
| pwg wrote:
| HP produced the HP-16C for programmers a long time ago:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-16C
|
| Swiss Micro seems to be producing clones:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/SwissMicros-DM16L/dp/B01DYTVZF2
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I know a guy who keeps one of these on his desk today. Thing
| must be 20+ years old. He claims it is the only calculator he
| can use now.
| Tor3 wrote:
| I have one, bought it new many decades ago. If the SwissMicro
| clones have as good keys as the old HP originals then I
| wouldn't hesitate buying one of those if you're interested in
| a 16C.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I use WolframAlpha for everything
| pcmoore wrote:
| I'm looking for a physical calculator
| jameshart wrote:
| Why?
|
| Calculators are a relic of when we used to require separate
| single function devices to accomplish anything, like VCRs,
| Cameras, GPS receivers, music samplers, or transistor
| radios.
|
| There is nothing a physical calculator can do that an
| IPython session can't. And a physical calculator can't copy
| paste the result where you want it (except modern phone
| camera OCR has I guess got to the point where you could
| probably grab the result off a calculator screen).
|
| Outside of cases where you need dedicated pieces of
| hardware to accomplish a task, like motors or heating
| elements or something, there's very little reason for
| preferring a dedicated device these days over a software or
| app equivalent. And even then, a version of the hardware
| that hooks up to a general purpose device to use its input
| and screen is likely the most useful form factor.
|
| Modern 'single function devices' are most likely actually
| just low power multifunction computers running most of the
| functionality in software anyway.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Dedicated physical buttons are far superior to
| 'universal' touchscreen interfaces, if the thing you need
| fits on them.
|
| And having a separate dedicated device helps having a
| workflow that doesn't invite distraction or context
| switching on a universal device, so having a dedicated
| device often is a reasonable intentional choice even if
| the same functionality is already available on another
| non-dedicated device.
| jameshart wrote:
| You can buy dedicated physical buttons and plug them into
| a computer. They're called 'keyboards'.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Some even come in a format specialized for numerical data
| entry. They're called "numpads". :)
| Tor3 wrote:
| I use a computer, and, as you mentioned later, one with a
| keyboard connected. However, except for simple stuff I
| still reach for my phone which has an HP emulator
| running, to do calculations with what looks like an
| actual calculator. Except that it doesn't have those very
| special old HP calculator buttons, so it's much worse
| than the real thing (I have an HP 16C laying around, but
| not a general style HP). But still preferable to the
| computer. So, here I am, with a computer and having used
| computers daily for close to half a century, and _still_
| grabbing for a dedicated thing for doing certain types of
| calculations.
| eole666 wrote:
| For those looking for a more usable emulator for every day life,
| some have been available for years. Having a ti 86 emulated on my
| phone was great when I was a student (and way cheaper than a real
| one..). http://fms.komkon.org/ATI85/
| db48x wrote:
| I use an HP48 emulator on my phone for day-to-day mathematical
| tasks.
| throw0101c wrote:
| Next up: slide rules (?).
| middicab wrote:
| Done: https://www.sliderules.org/
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Versalog was King.
|
| http://www.srtco.us/PostCrossRef/SubPages/1460%5B1950-%5D.ht...
| bane wrote:
| Despite being a terrible price/per unit technology, I loved my TI
| calculators, but I was always sort of out of sync with everybody
| else trying to chase more symbolic math power. Everybody using a
| TI-82? I'll get a TI-85. School system migrates to the TI-85?
| I'll get a TI-86! University wanted a TI-89, I'll get the Amiga
| in a box TI-92+.
|
| The downside? The teachers were only trained on a specific model,
| so I was always on my own. Good side? I was on my own to do
| whatever I wanted with these things. I turned my TI-86 into an
| animation flipbook and rogue-light dungeon explorer using TI-
| basic and the drawing tools on the calc. I loaded my TI-92+ down
| with games and even tried to write a shmup for it while learning
| C using an absolutely terrible early dev environment I pulled off
| of ticalc.org.
|
| The ecosystem of hackers, apps, and gamers for these things is
| wild and very extensive. After university I looked on with envy
| as later TI calcs added more features and capabilities.
|
| I still run a TI-89 emulator on my phone as the default
| calculator. It's so much more powerful than the crap calculator
| apps that come with the phones.
| tombert wrote:
| I had a similar pattern though for slightly different reasons.
|
| My parents got me TI-83 for my calculus class in high school,
| which is what everyone had and I was in sync. I managed to drop
| my calculator down a sewer grating somehow, and I was too
| embarrassed to ask my parents to buy me a new one, and I
| couldn't afford another TI graphing calculator, so I ended up
| getting a substantially cheaper Casio FX-9750G at a thrift
| store, which actually turned out to be a reasonably good
| calculator for the price, and got me through Calculus I without
| too much trouble.
|
| In calculus II I wanted the symbolic stuff, so I managed to
| find a used HP 50g, and I immediately fell in love with it (and
| RPN in particular), and ended up using it for everything. I got
| spreadsheet software installed on there, I played with 3d
| graphing, I got a clone of Zelda working, it was super awesome.
| It was almost more like a PDA than a calculator to me.
|
| Similarly, I run an the iHP48 emulator on my phone as my
| default calculator now.
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(page generated 2023-01-29 23:00 UTC)