Aside from keyboard not being quite at HP level (but then which one is? And it is still good), DM42 is entirely better version tbh. Even works with printer!
Weird obscure fact: The printer head for HP calculator printer was still available as new parts as late as 2019, coz it was used in variety of devices, I bought cheap non-working one and just replaced the head
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There is a fork with that available.
as posted below:
For anyone that wants a physical version, SwissMicros makes a calculator based off of Free42: https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm42
That website mentions that they use decimal floating point. Since free42 is licensed under gpl3, they have released the source.
https://github.com/swissmicros/DM42PGM/tree/master/lib
https://github.com/swissmicros/free42/tree/master/inteldecim...
They use Intel's library for decimal floating point: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-decimal-floa...
It's still not the real HP-42S with its quirks, but it's nice to have decimal floating point operations.
Aside from keyboard not being quite at HP level (but then which one is? And it is still good), DM42 is entirely better version tbh. Even works with printer!
Weird obscure fact: The printer head for HP calculator printer was still available as new parts as late as 2019, coz it was used in variety of devices, I bought cheap non-working one and just replaced the head