After having need of it for some time, we have finally made ourselves a spot on the Cemetech forum index specific to HP calculator news, projects and programming support. I've looked through some of the subforums, like the Technology and Calculator open topic, and moved what topics I could find over to the new section. If you happen to find any other topics I might have missed that are specific to HP calculators, or maybe something about Casio not in the Casio section, let us know, and we'll see if it's something that needs to be moved. We look forward to continuing to drive discussion and exploration of HP's calculators old and new here at Cemetech.

On that note, Lionel Debrouxl, an administrator of French-language TI site TI-Planet, mentioned on an HP enthusiast forum that he succeeded in making a small replacement firmware image for the HP Prime. He describes it as a "DummyOS", a proof-of-concept that it's possible to put third-party OSes on the device, but it's a nice reminder that the platform is relatively accessible for developers. While it's not yet clear how to write ASM/C programs for the Prime's built-in operating system, the Prime's S3C2416 ARM processor is supported by Linux, and building a Linux image for the device with some driver work is in the realm of possibility with a few weeks of work by community members. We look forward to watching or perhaps participating in this research.

Projects should just go under "Your Projects", yes?

I'm kind of leaving it open, since the Casio coders have been using the Casio section for projects as well. So they can post in either.

I'm interested to hear about Lionel's work with an alternative OS (I noticed that Omnimaga mis-characterized this work as getting ASM programs running on the HP Prime ). It certainly cool that the Prime can book standard ELF images, and hopefully there's sufficient documentation that can be found or figured out about the keyboard and LCD to make it possible to boot something Linuxy on it. I'm tempted to give it a try one of these days, if I can find the time.

The other link for my third-party firmware PoC is in fact http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=14939 : it was posted on TI-Planet before being posted on MoHPC

Months ago, I put together a collection of S3C241x-related links at the TI-Planet hpwiki, which remains ([EDIT the next day: might have been better if the implied "to date" / "for now" in my mind had been explicit, oh well; I do know all things are temporary) the best source of technical information about the Prime: http://tiplanet.org/hpwiki/index.php?title=HP_Prime/Emulation

Indeed, that's handy. I don't suppose anyone has poked at the official OS yet to learn more about the LCD and keyboard? That seems like a bold statement to make in a topic about Cemetech's new HP section.

Besides the early poking by an anonymous user last summer ( http://tiplanet.org/hpwiki/index.php?title=User:BXCBOOT0_BIN_pastebin_com_SKw5xtev ), not that I'm aware of.


He he. Well, at the time of this writing, it's true, and we'll try to make it remain that way
The historical wiki of the HP community doesn't contain much about the Prime. I'm not aware Cemetech has something like TI-Planet's hpwiki. Furthermore, this topic is partially about the fact Cemetech has just created a HP Prime section, months after TI-Planet and Omnimaga did
However, Cemetech is somewhat better at not discouraging high-profile users from contributing to the forum than Omnimaga is, which cannot be a bad thing for Cemetech's Prime section.

Well, as far as I know, Omnimaga only discourages users from trying to take control of the site directly (such as taking over the IRC channel by demoting everyone, which happened before) or indirectly (such as by manipulating the admins or forcing them to manage the site differently then spreading libelous claims about them). If Cemetech admins decides to run their site how they want and not let themselves manipulated by admins of other sites, I would hope that those high-profile users won't leave Cemetech as well.


Also it's generally bad netiquette when somebody brags about how his site or sister site is better than the one he's posting on. It can be true or not but it's not going to result into an enthusiasticly-positive reaction.

FWIW, I've worked a bit more on the PoC (porting to the Prime TICT's TI-68k starfield effect, which I already ported to the Nspire), but haven't been able to finish something that actually works.
And every help reverse-engineering the Prime's low-level stuff is welcome, we're all in the same boat.


DJ_O: my claim was accompanying the link most relevant to parts of Kerm's post that I know of, mind you
If Kerm had been hurt by that part of the post, he'd probably have used other words / other ways to tell me so. I also know that he has better abilities for accepting truth than a number of other persons.

Your interpretation of past events would be off-topic even if it were accurate, so let's stop it now, as the local admins have requested on #cemetech ?