Emulating a HP38 calc with saturn

Last updated on January 27th, 2006.

This document have been written by Khanh-Dang Nguyen Thu-Lam (kdntl at yahoo . fr). The original version can be found at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/kdntl/hp49/saturn_38.html

Introduction

saturn is a program intended for UNIX systems. It can emulate the HP39/40, the HP48 and the HP49. But the original version does not contain any HP38 support.

In fact, adding the HP38 is very easy, as the HP38 hardware is nearly exactly the same as a HP48G. The only thing that really changes is the keyboard layout.

This document describes how to emulate a HP38 with saturn. Then, you can easily load a file into the emulated calc. This feature is great: even emu48 doesn't have it!

See how it looks like there:

What you need

Here is what you need:

• An UNIX environment that can compile the program saturn,
• a HP38 ROM,
• this file: Saturn.ad.

Let's go

Just untar the saturn archive and compile it as usual:
$ mkdir saturn_src
$ cd saturn_src
$ tar -xfz saturnv4111src.tar.gz
$ xmkmf
$ make


Now, replace the old Saturn.ad file with the one you've just downloaded.

You can then run the emulator with something like that:
./run_saturn -reset -rom rom.38 -face hp38 -hw hp48
provided that you got the file rom.38 with ./pack /path/to/emu48-rom38 rom.38, where /path/to/emu48-rom38 is the HP38 ROM in emu48 format. Please refer to the saturn documentation for further details.

Notes

• I also needed to do ln -S Saturn.ad Saturn in order to make saturn work (can't remember why).
• It's better to have a double-sized lcd, if you are working with a decent screen. Just replace the line #define LCD_MAG 1 in config.h with this one: #define LCD_MAG 2. Then, you have to recompile saturn with make clean ; make.
• The two null keys in the second row should not be there.
• I don't know why but you should not create the files port1 and port2 in order to avoid the initial error message. If you do so, saturn won't be able to emulate the HP38 (I think it's because the ROM cannot handle neither port 1 nor port 2).