this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Can you install arch on this?

[–] toni_bmw 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Frankly, I liked the colors, it seemed beautiful to me. But I'm uncomfortable with any machine that doesn't have RPN...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

It does look nice!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

It is a beast of a machine, and one of the best in terms of accuracy and precision. It can handle edge cases in both trig and calculus better than any TI or Sharp scientific calculator on the market, and it is wicked fast. The only thing that kept it from being the perfect scientific calculator was its lack of persistent memory. It has a surprisingly powerful little spreadsheet mode that is completely crippled by the fact that if you power down the calculator, everything is lost. Now that I'm aging and my visual acuity is taking a nosedive, I also find the density of the tiny print above the keys makes it more difficult to use, but it is still one of the first calculators I reach for.

It is a shame about the RPN, though.

[–] Diplomjodler3 2 points 2 months ago

More importantly, does it run Doom?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have one very similar, if not identical, to this. Can you install custom firmware/is the firmware open source?

[–] toni_bmw 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

mmm, I wasn't aware of that; I'm going to investigate. Thank you for the comment!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Just to make it clear; I wasn't saying that you could, I was asking if you could.

[–] toni_bmw 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

ok, doing a first search I have not found information about this particular model

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

The firmware is definitely not open source, nor can it be modified in any way that I'm aware of. The processor is coated in black resin, so you can't get to the pins. That makes reverse engineering much more difficult. There are some graphing calculators that can have custom firmware installed, but the only scientific calculators that I'm aware of with that functionality would be the SwissMicros line of calculators and the new HP 15C Collector's Edition.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

That is not only beautiful, but incredibly interesting as well! It is incredibly similar to the fx-991EX, but it has no solar panel and a couple of additional functions. The fx-991EX does not have the product function (ALPHA + x) in the upper right, simplify (ALPHA + (), MCD (ALPHA + *), MCM (ALPHA + /), int (ALPHA + +), intg (ALPHA + -), PreAns (ALPHA + Ans), and two functions that I don't recognize (ALPHA + FRAC) and (ALPHA + SQRT). There are also some localization changes to the trigonometric functions. What a wonderful find!