HP48/49 Emulation on the Tungsten
Ever since I got my Tungsten C, I had been intrigued by one particular application for Palm OS 5 that was listed on PalmOpenSource.Com: the Power48 emulator for HP calculators. The problem was that the emulator required actual roms from HP. While these are available at HPCalc.Org, they needed to be installed in a particular way on the SD card. Which posed two problems: I didn't have an SD card, and when I tried to copy the rom files onto somebody else's SD card as a test, it seemed like the digital rights management software embedded in the SD card, in conjunction with the Windoze box on which we tried that, kindly prevented me from doing that, or at least in the way needed for Power48. So we called that a draw.

More recently, I noticed a 16 mb SD card for a whopping $2.99, shipping included, on the always help TechBargains site. So I ordered one, and got it today.

And lo and behold, it now works. I first tried to transfer the files via Card Directories, a little Palm app to place files anywhere on MMC or SD cards. Didn't seem to work, though.

After upgrading to the newest version of Power48, I sort-of learned from the README that a) the HP roms needed to be converted -- for which one needs to employ a Windows binary, and having the work laptop home proved useful for that, and b) that these thusly generated files needed to be installed under Windows too -- pilot-xfer did indeed fail.

And lo and behold, having done that, Power48 now works and I have three new (emulated) calculators.

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