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Feel free to use whatever you find herein - to whatever you like. Just give due credit to me as the originator.

The Amar Non-Playing Character generation program is online again.

Watermirror

There is such a thing as an ultimate calculator. It was made by Hewlett Packard and was named HP-41. Along with the appropriate programs, it can do almost anything you want it to. This is of course subjective. Given enough brain washing, this will be true for you too :)

The HP-41, even though a venerable machine, is certainly not obsolete. With the help of many techno wizards, new advances are made for the ultimate calculator. Diego Diaz and his Clonix and NoV projects are indeed welcome additions. It brings much life to the 41 - it brings lots of ROM and RAM. After receiving the NoV-64, my primary tool (yes, the calculator :) has grown by 32K ROM (HEPAX and 4*4K user defined ROM images) and 64K RAM (HEPAX RAM) - holy cow, that's a lot of memory.

The NoV-64's HEPAX RAM is divided into four blocks of four 4K pages each. Until now, switching between the blocks has been a matter of manually tweaking the bits in the address 4100 (10Xh - where the X is 0-3 depending on the block you want or 20Xh if you want the other 16K ROM block available).

Go to the ICEBOX page for more information and to download the rom image, the manual and the source code.

Being a calculator collector and addict, I search out new uses for my little precious ones. My calculators are solutions in search of a problem.

I have always thought of the HP-16C as a special item in my collections. It's the only programmable programmers calculator, and it's capabilities are indeed impressive. But other than simple additions and subtractions in hex mode, I didn't really find any use for it. Until I got more heavily involved in Machine CODE (MCODE) programming on the HP-41.

I really love MCODE. With it I can make the HP-41 do just about anything. It's a nice challenge to do weird stuff on a 30 year old technology.

Some of the challenges in MCODE has to do with calculating jump codes. I used to carry a set of tables to get the right hex words for jumping short distances, for doing calls to the operating system and for the port dependent jumps. No more. The HP-16C comes to the rescue.

Go to the MJUMP page for more information and for the program listing.

The main UC-41 programs. They conform to the above mentioned coding standard.

• HP-41 UAC - the HP-41 Ultimate Alarm Clock.
• HP-41 REM - the HP-41 REMembering (event manager, PDA).
• HP-41 NOTES - the HP-41 quick notes taker.

Small utility programs that does useful little tasks.

• HP-41 D-W-D - a date-to-weeknumber-to-date converter.
• HP-41 SLA - calculate guaranteed uptimes and allowed downtimes.
• HP-41 SUBN - subnet mask to # of IP addresses.

A set of useful tools for programming the HP-41:

• HP-41 Coding Standard - a standard for HP-41 programs.
• "lifasread" - a Ruby script to read an ascii file stored in a lif-formated file (used by the HP-41 as file format on mass storage mediums. Tested on Linux. Run the script with the -h (or --help) option to see how it is used.
• "lifaswrite" - a Ruby script to write a text file to a lif-formated file (the reverse of "lifasread". Run the script with the -h (or --help) option to see how it is used.
• HP-41 VIM syntax gives you syntax highlighting in VIM when writing HP-41 programs.
• HP-41 VIM ftplugin gives you tools to more easily write HP-41 programs in VIM.

This page is an attempt at elevating the HP-41 to the ultimate calculator (the UC-41) by giving you good quality, useful software. Here is a list of further resources:

• The HP-41 reference site
• The Museum of HP Calculators
• The HP Forum, a discussion forum for HP calculator enthusiasts

To let you in on a secret: HP rot13 is UC, and 41 rot13 is of course 41 in base 13 :)
Hence, UC-41 is really HP-41 rot13.