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From: Michael J. Schülke on 27 Oct 2009 08:39
Hello,

I'm somewhat new to HP calculators, so please bear with me...

I recently acquired an HP 48g, which one of the previous owners had
upgraded to 128K RAM. The upgrade was done internally, so I have no idea
of the details.

I don't have another 48g to compare, but the calculator seems to be a
bit slow, especially outside the main screen / stack display. Browsing
the equation library is a pain, building up the "set time and date"
screen takes several seconds, and there's a sluggish feel to every pop-
up menu I encounter.

Is that just the way it is with every 48g, or is there some way that a
(improperly done?) memory upgrade could have caused this slowness? If
so, how can I find the cause, and how can I fix it?

Regards,
Michael
From: Yann on 27 Oct 2009 09:03
You may use Emu48
http://hp.giesselink.com/emu48.htm
the HP48 emulator
to compare speeds.

There is a checkbox which allows to select "real speed".

If the emulator is much faster than your real 48G,
then it is a problem specific to this hardware part.

Regards
From: Yann on 27 Oct 2009 09:11
Quick follow up :

Sometimes, an over-sized (or improperly sized) return stack
can make any little action very slow.

Technically, this is because most actions require temporary memory,
and each temporary memory allocation require to move the return stack.

Simple solution :
press "ON+C" for a warm reset.

The return stack will get initialised.
From: Michael J. Schülke on 28 Oct 2009 16:15
Yann schrieb:
> You may use Emu48

> There is a checkbox which allows to select "real speed".
>
> If the emulator is much faster than your real 48G,
> then it is a problem specific to this hardware part.

Thanks a lot. The emulator is slightly faster than the real calculator,
but I'd put that down to the difficulty of achieving "real speed"
precisely in an emulator running on a virtual Windows machine under Mac
OS X and Parallels.

So my 48G is alright, but that raises a different question:

I'm quite familiar with several Z80 and 6502-based computers from the
1980s, as well as (dare I say that here?) TI's Z80-based calculators. On
those platforms, outputting a text string on a bitmap screen is a
relatively fast, computationally inexpensive operation -- is's usually
possible to fill the entire screen with text in a fraction of a second.
What makes at least parts of the 48G's user interface -- the pop-up
menus, the TIME screen, the equation library -- so relatively slow?

Regards,
Michael
From: Eric Rechlin on 28 Oct 2009 16:30
"Michael J. Sch�lke" <news(a)mjschuelke.de> wrote:
> Is that just the way it is with every 48g, or is there some way that a
> (improperly done?) memory upgrade could have caused this slowness? If
> so, how can I find the cause, and how can I fix it?

Upgrading the memory does indeed make it slower. Now it's as slow as a
48GX.

If you compare a stock 48G and a 48GX side-by-side, the G will be faster.
This is because the Saturn can only address 512KB of memory. A 48G has
512KB of ROM and 32KB of RAM, so it only has to "swap" out 1/16 of the ROM
to address the RAM. However, the 48GX (and your 48G) has 128KB of RAM, so
it has to swap out 1/4 of the ROM, which slows things down.

The difference isn't huge, but the 48GX is definitely slower.

Both feel pretty slow. Maybe it was more acceptable 15 years ago, but now,
with computers so much faster, we are less forgiving.

The best choice is to find a third-party replacement for the components that
you find to be slow. Many things that are slow in the 48 have replacements
written by the user community that are more efficient and run much faster.

Installing SpeedUI might help with some of your concerns.

Regards,

Eric Rechlin

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