Philadelphia Area HP Handheld Club Meeting

Wednesday, February 19, 1997 - Drexel University

HP48 Meta Kernel is Officially Released

Just a few weeks ago, the MDG group in France released their first official copy of the HP48 Meta Kernel software. As mentioned a few times over the past year, this 128K software package overrides just about all of the HP48's built-in user interface, providing more, better and/or faster applications. Some of these are a quicker editor with cut/past/find/replace; stack display with up to 9 stack levels displayed (in small font); matrix writer which supports arrays containing strings, algebraics, binaries, etc as well as numbers; equation writer which is a hundred times as fast as the original version; a font editor; a GROB editor; a filer (similar to PCT for HP48) and much much more. The printed manual is 130 pages and looks good.

HP Windows CE Boxes Have Names

According to HP's latest press release, they've dubbed their Windows CE boxes the HP300LX and HP320LX, corresponding to the lower and higher-end models. As far as we know, the differences are at least as follows:

With the official announcement date to be around April 1st, we should know more fairly soon, including prices. Of note is that these models were NOT named Omnigo, like the 700LX. I suspect that this may be due to the intended differentiation of these models from the organizer line. One wonders how much longer the Omnigo 100 and 120 models will remain on the price list, and whether there will ever be any successors. This is in light of the fact that low subscription numbers forced Thaddeus Computing to discontinue their Omnigo World magazine after only one year.

HPCC Web Site Started

The Handheld and Portable Computer Club of London has started their own Web site to provide membership and activity information. Also, they are promoting their upcoming handheld conference in September on the Web. Check it out at http://www.hpcc.org on the web.

HPCC 15th Anniversary Conference

The HPCC conference, to be held on Spetember 20-21 at the Imperial College in London is beginning to be promoted. This is wise to allow as much time as possible to get the word out. At their previous big conference in 1992, they had around 100 attendees from all over the world, including around nine from the U.S. It is hoped that at least one HP/Singapore representative can be there to speak on behalf of the company. By then the Windows CE units will be on the street for several months, so perhaps we'll hear tidbits about what is coming up next.

Win48 Demo Version Enhanced

The latest demonstration version of the Win48 HP48 emulator for Windows 95 has been enhanced quite a bit from its former version. Of most significance is that the 2-minute running time limit has been removed, so one can test it out for as long as necessary. It does not permit saving or restoring memory to or from the PC, is limited to 32K of RAM and does not allow saving images of calculator RAM. In the true version, available for only $12., you have access to up to 4 meg of RAM and can import or export HP48 objects or whole RAM images. In addition, the keyboard picture may be customized to conform to any custom software which may redefine the keyboard. Check out this latest version of Win48 at http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/5948 on the web.

An HP41 Emulator for PCs

In searching around for an RPN calculator emulator for PC's, I stumbled upon a really nice HP41 emulator, which seems to run under Windows or DOS. It is called "ttcalc", and places a full picture of the calculator keyboard and display on the computer screen. Much like Win48, you press the screen keys by clicking the mouse. The only nasty thing about this emulator is that the on-line help is all written in German. The short start-up instructions with the emulator are in English, but that's where it stops. So...if anyone knows German, perhaps we can find out how to do things like importing and exporting HP41 programs between the emulator and PC memory.

HP200LX 4 Meg and HP1000CX 2-Meg

This past month, HP officially announced the discontinuance of the 1-meg HP200LX and HP1000CX along with the introduction of the 4-meg 200LX and the 2-meg 1000CX. (The 1000CX is a DOS-only LX model with no application software.) New prices are $499. for the 2-meg 200LX, $599. (not $699. as earlier thought) for the 4-meg 200LX and $499. for the 2-meg 1000CX.