It has been available for a couple of days now and I’ve just tidied the website up enough to be able to talk about it.
A HP29 calculator is fairly unusual. There are quite a few emulators available for other HP Calculators, especially the HP35, HP45 and HP25. And of course for the more recent ones such as the HP41 and HP48. However, the HP29 hasn’t had the same degree of interest and that is surprising because it is a very good calculator.
The main one I found was MikeT’s emulator which is part of a wonderful collection here.
Mike’s is really nice and I love that it is part of a set. The only downside is it won’t run on my phone. So, as part of a project to change my HP67 emulator display software to work for other “woodstock” models which have a 12 digit display, I did a HP29 emulator. The woodstock series were the HP21, HP25, HP29 and HP67 (plus the financial models). The HP67 had a 15 digit display like the “classic” series (HP35, HP45, HP55, and HP65). HP changed to using a single digit to display both a number and a decimal point. Previously, the decimal point had it’s own position and showed as ” .” instead of “n.”. Enough of the background.
The emulator looks like:
Tapping the display brings up a menu that will show you a lot of information, including a full listing of what is in program memory. It isn’t just a listing either. You can edit it right there in the page and when you exit that page the calculator program gets updated too. The other plus with this approach is you can copy and paste programs in and out of the calculator even though it didn’t have a card reader. That’s much better than keying it in by hand.
The software doesn’t care about the line numbers so you can paste two programs together and it will merge the two properly; even if it starts again with line one further down. Exiting and returning to the page will renumber them properly.
The product page for it is here.
