Author Topic: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES (Read 16547 times)

supergems · « **on:** October 27, 2014, 04:14:24 am »

Hello everyone, some games based on openfire can be found here:

http://fly.srk.fer.hr/~manjo/openfire/games.html

Best regards

Keoni29 · « **Reply #1 on:** October 27, 2014, 05:27:32 am »

Did you make all of these? This stuff looks pretty old. (not just the dates on the files, but also the "new" gif)

DJ Omnimaga · « **Reply #2 on:** October 27, 2014, 07:08:21 am »

Wow, those looks amazing. I wish I had that calc. I wish that people still made games for those calculators since they are still sold by HP.

Sorunome · « **Reply #3 on:** October 27, 2014, 07:12:49 am »

Yup, those look pretty sweet (and old

)

Keoni29 · « **Reply #4 on:** October 27, 2014, 07:19:06 am »

The openfire banner on top wastes a lot of precious screen space though.

DJ Omnimaga · « **Reply #5 on:** October 27, 2014, 09:13:42 am »

Yeah it reminds me of pure Basic graphical CSE games. It's most likely an Openfire limitation

Keoni29 · « **Reply #6 on:** October 27, 2014, 05:25:28 pm »

There should just be a splash screen at the beginning of the application just like the free version of Game Maker on PC.

DJ Omnimaga · « **Reply #7 on:** October 27, 2014, 05:39:22 pm »

Yeah I agree. I don't understand why they did that

. I mean I'm ok with promoting a language or engine (if I ever made an RPG Maker or something for calcs it would have an Omni logo somewhere) but as long as it's at the beginning of the game.

3298 · « **Reply #8 on:** October 27, 2014, 06:56:25 pm »

The banner is placed there because that space would be empty otherwise. The games are ports of 49G games, so they only use the 131*64 pixels of that calculator.
The 49G had different hardware, and even though the transition from its real Saturn to the ARM-based Saturn emulator of the 49G+/50G was mostly seamless, the development team took advantage of the emulator's additional possibilities and installed another screen with 16 more lines and other differences. Thus the old grayscale routines were one out of just a few things breaking between the 49G and 49G+.
OpenFire has some modes designed to facilitate porting old games by adding a few calls to its code. That code does some magic to emulate the old grayscale techniques. Newer games would use 80 rows and other modes which use hardware grayscale (2-bit with palette or 4-bit) of the new display instead of the old page-flipping tricks (multiple 1-bit buffers, can lead to flickering if the pointer to the active buffer is not switched between them fast enough) employed on the 49G and the even older 48S(X) and 48G(X).

Slightly offtopic:
DJ, you may remember Code Golf #5 (the Snake one). I had a OpenFire version in the works, but it wasn't finished in time. I might pick that up again if there's someone interested. It'll be compatible with the real calc only, though - Emu48 does only Saturn emulation (they can emulate most of the 49G+ and 50G through modified ROMs, but OpenFire is incompatible at least because it uses ARM code), and x49gp does not handle grayscale at all. (Luckily it's open source, so someone [TM] could patch that. (Additional info for this someone: the place to change is s3c2410_lcd.c:153-174) The next issue is OS compatibility: I haven't been able to compile it for Windows, but admittedly I didn't try very hard yet.)
Emu48 does run old 49G games, and there's even an easy way to get an instance of that running: the Debug4x SDK contains it along with the correct ROMs and KML scripts and everything. Don't tell anyone, though; of course the ROMs are copyrighted.

TIfanx1999 · « **Reply #9 on:** October 27, 2014, 07:00:15 pm »

Thanks for the good info. I have an HP 50g floating around somewhere. When I got it though there was virtually no info about it (or games) that I could find on the web. It's a shame because it's actually a pretty powerful calculator hardware wise. When it came out, I think it was actually the strongest. If there was more exposure and info on it I think it could have done much better.

DJ Omnimaga · « **Reply #10 on:** October 27, 2014, 07:01:42 pm »

Aaah I see now. I really need to figure out where to buy a 50g for cheap (until last summer they were almost $210 in Canada excluding taxes and now they're no longer sold here). Would the 49g+ be reliable or is it really as bad as some reviews claimed? Not that I plan to develop for the 50g since I prefer focusing my energy on HP PPL and 84+CSE hybrid BASIC, but I would still like to be able to try some programs one day.

3298 · « **Reply #11 on:** October 28, 2014, 05:14:58 am »

The cheapest option would probably be Ebay. I got mine three years ago from there for about US$ 100 + shipping from USA to Germany. Still cheaper than the Ebay sellers around here, but I had to wait almost two months. Apparently it came by ship instead of by plane.
A quick search from over here resulted in this being the cheapest one by far. Given your different location, you might find a cheaper seller (because Ebay likes to filter out sellers not shipping to where people are querying from). Also, there is a 50G version with a different color scheme (blue instead of black) and a different pouch, but I prefer the black one.
The 49G+ is not as pretty, and it's missing one of the communication ports (which is rarely used nowadays though, because it has USB and an SD card slot). The reports about hardware quality are varying, but the newer ones supposedly are close to the 50G. Unfortunately, judging from this thread on MoHPC (which also explains what to search for) the good ones are not easy to identify.

One more comment from a former Casio user who converted to HP: These calculators are operated in RPN, which takes some time to get used to. They do have an algebraic mode, but they are much more powerful in RPN. Since you have a Prime, I'd advise you to switch it to RPN (even though the Prime's RPN mode is quite crippled) as a training before you get a 49 or 50.

And finally I want to direct your attention towards this site with two interesting 50G projects, one being HPGCC3, a utility to write programs for the ARM-based calculators in C, and the other one being newRPL, a firmware replacement project in the making - they want to get rid of the Saturn emulation layer by writing an OS running directly on the ARM processor with functions similar to the existing OS.

supergems · « **Reply #12 on:** October 28, 2014, 05:59:32 am »

DJ Omnimaga · « **Reply #13 on:** October 28, 2014, 10:40:31 am »

They didn't do much HP Prime advertising either it seems, except online. They did more than the HP 50g but still not enough to grab a decent market share, not to mention the bugs (although I heard that back in 2006, the HP 49g+ had many bugs too).

Is the on-calc language available (I believe it's SysRPL, right?) viable for simple games or is it as slow as 68K BASIC?

Quote from: 3298 on October 28, 2014, 05:14:58 am

And finally I want to direct your attention towards this site with two interesting 50G projects, one being HPGCC3, a utility to write programs for the ARM-based calculators in C, and the other one being newRPL, a firmware replacement project in the making - they want to get rid of the Saturn emulation layer by writing an OS running directly on the ARM processor with functions similar to the existing OS.

Woah a new OS, if it gets released, unlike most Z80 calculator OSes other than KnightOS, would be amazing, especially if it gets rid of the emulation layer. With no emulation layer, even a language like TI-BASIC would rival TI-Nspire Lua in terms of speed and perhaps be much faster. Not to mention much faster graphing speeds. It's a shame that the 50g speed is not used to its full potential.

supergems · « **Reply #14 on:** October 28, 2014, 11:15:33 am »

available language are UserRPL and SystemRPL, the latter is faster but more difficult... regarding newRPL from http://hpgcc3.org/projects/newrpl we read:

Quote

Introduction

This is the main page of the newRPL project.

The project aims to create a new RPL calculator environment to run in real calculator hardware.

Initially, the target will be the HP50g hardware, consisting on the following:

ARM 920T processor running at up to 200 MHz
512 KBytes of RAM
2 MBytes of NOR flash memory.
16-grays screen, 131x80 pixels
Areas of development
This project will develop the following concepts:

RPL execution environment: This module will be independent of the hardware, and provide the services needed to execute programs in the RPL language, such as compilation, memory management, garbage collection.
RPL language specifications: This module will define the keywords and syntax of the new language, numeric algorithms, data types, etc.
Hardware abstraction layer: This module will run on bare metal hardware and provide the basic services needed for the calculator to function. It will be kept to a minimum, to make porting to a different hardware easier.

Author Topic: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES (Read 16547 times)

supergems

HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

Keoni29

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

DJ Omnimaga

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

Sorunome

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

Keoni29

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

DJ Omnimaga

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

Keoni29

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

DJ Omnimaga

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

3298

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

TIfanx1999

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

DJ Omnimaga

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

3298

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

supergems

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

DJ Omnimaga

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES

supergems

Re: HP 50g/49g+ GRAYSCALE GAMES