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Using the Gnu C Compiler and ARM assembler for the HP49G+.

LAST MODIFICATION: 09/09/2005

Most of the information on HPGCC is outdated, please go to the HPGCC main page at
HPGCC homepage for recent news.
The latest official release of HPGCC with examples can be found here or on HPGCC homepage.
Currently, i just maintain an up-to-date windows installer (see below) and historical information for people interested.

Some programs done with HPGCC:

Experimental Games

15/05/2005: LChess by Chris Smith in thumb arm for Rom 2.0.
15/05/2005: Tetris in thumb arm for Rom 2.0 (faster...) by me.
15/05/2005: Space Dementia II, updated for Rom 2.0 Copyright Thibault Chevallier, sources on his homepage.
01/10/2004: Tetris for Rom 1.23 by me.

Some screenshots of what You can do with hpgcc...

17/06/2005: Tetris.
17/06/2005: LChess.
17/06/2005: Space Dementia Intro.
17/06/2005: Space Dementia Ship selection.
17/06/2005: Space Dementia in-game.
17/06/2005: Space Dementia in-game.
17/06/2005: My balcony (with some flowers).
17/06/2005: My girlfriend's flower.

The latest experimental Setup packages (windows self-installer) are
here

Note: if you already have cygwin installed, YOU MUST copy your current cygwin1.dll from your cygwin/bin directory to hpgcc's arm-hp/bin directory. If you have an old installation (before june 2005), the package might be subject to a critical bug during the uninstall. Please install a current package OVER it, or simply delete the folder.

How to compile a simple example with the Windows Setup:

An installation tutorial is provided inside the package, or it can be read here. First, open a project file (*.pnproj) with the Programmer's Notepad, for example arm-hp/examples/games/games.pnproj. Then, double click on a .c file in the project window to open a source file (for example: tetris.c). Go to the Tool menu, select Make clean to remove any .hp files or .o object files that can be in the directory. Finally, select Tool menu/Make this .hp to build the hp file (here it is tetris.hp). Transfer the file to your calculator, put the string on the stack and lunch the arm program with the ArmToolBox from Claudio Lapilli (you can find it in arm-hp/ARMToolBox/SETUP.BIN). Any valuable feedback is welcome at:



Here is some old information.

This page only shows early work done on how to compile (very) simple C files with gcc so that can be run on a HP49.

This page is intended to help people writing C/ASM progs with their PC using the GNU tools. This is not a compiled page of the excellent web page of Al Borowski. Every single piece of information comes from it or from the HP48 newsgroup.
I simply urge you to check Al's page since you can grab a lot of information about how ARM is working and how you can program the HP49 in ARM assembly.

A first step to HP-gcc: converting elf format to A>CP format: elf2hp tool

You'll need some files tools to make compilation easier.
The ld script to replace the default ld's one.
The elf converter&loader (with globals).
For multiple files compilation, follow the next steps:

Little history:

The first tries of using gcc were explained here. This page explains the issues that appears when using elf format, and it propose a very simple arm binary code to HP string converter (with "A>CP" header).
A second version of the document was written, it was taking a step further by using a small tool, the HPpatch tool. This patch allows to start a main() entry function.
This page presents the current development stage of elf2hp, a utility to convert arm-elf binary to a hp string with "A>CP" header.

What elf2hp does ?

Registers Save&Load :

Al said that R0-R12 should be saved. For that, arm asm code is put at the begining of your elf executable and branch to your main function. The registers are restored at the end.

Relocate sections of elf file :

As some might knows, the elf format specifies how a file is to be loaded in memory. The elf standard gives names to particular sections: .text is the code (read only), .rodata is some read only data, .data is initialized read-write data, .bss is a 0'd block to be used by the program. Elf2hp insert a portion of code that does the address translation for you. That's why you must use the previous flags during the compilation/linking.

A note for linux users: how to connect their HP to the usb port

If your usb_serial module is very up-to date (25 april 05), the HP should be detected by the usb module. If not, load the module this way:
modprobe usbserial vendor=0x03f0 product=0x0121
Now, using dmesg, you should read this:
usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using address 7
usbserial 2-1:1.0: Generic converter detected
usb 2-1: Generic converter now attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tts/0 for devfs)
In case you don't have the /dev/ttyUSB0, try this:
mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0

Then, the /dev/ttyUSB0 port is ready for serial transfer. Daniel Herring has prepared the following help file. People that want to build there own Xmodem client can look at this old post.
You can download a compiled Tetris example for the hp on this link.

For more details on source code, screen io, keys, ... see the HPGCC homepage.
Feel free to email me at:
Have fun with your hp49g+!