[time-nuts] Rom Expansion for HP5370B

[paul swed]

My this would be quite a task to reverse engineer.
Though only 8K of eprom I suspect its cleverly coded. But since this is a
desert island kind of discussion here are my 2 cents. (Truly the value)

The propellers are parallel processors. Sort of the Basic stamp2 for
parallel processing. They are fast, much faster then the 6800s. But I don't
think this is really a parallel challenge since the software was written for
serial processing.

Now for my really cheezy 2 cents.

I would do it in Basic on a SXb most likely the SX48 not that you need the
IO. Thats handy but far more instruction space. Cycle time of a simple bit
on off command at 70 Mhz is 200ns. Increasing instructions do not seem to
add a lot and you can directly get into the assembly language and go as deep
as you care to.

So its quite speedy and does also have interrupt capability. At a cost of
$3-4 each its nothing to use several for different apps like the front panel
display and keys, control for actual counting and finally a third for
ethernet or GPIB. (Maybe I will get to that one day)

But really the key to any of this would be the accurate decoding of the
existing software.
Though HP service docs are somewhat useful in this approach for the 5370
vintage. At least you tend to be able to understand what IO does what.
For me since the 3 5370s are working, I won't be hacking them anytime soon.
Like'em the way they are.

Regards
Paul
WB8TSL

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk>wrote:

> In message <11df8bbd5d5941b0d47d4afe0321a8a8.squirrel at webmail.montana.com>,
> "Do
> n Latham" writes:
>
> >>From reasonable ignorance, would a device like the Parallax propeller do
> >>From reasonable ignorance, would a device like the Parallax propeller do
> >the job? I have a couple of 5370 A models here...
>
> I don't know the Propeller well enough, but I would doubt it,
>
> --
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
>
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