HP-15C Simulator

I have had an HP-15C for many years, the calculator that has no equal. I used it through college and beyond in my career. After getting used to RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), I found it quite intuitive and easy to use when solving complex math problems. The other day, I reached for my trusty 15C and found the batteries dead... The dreaded day that my professors in school had talked about had finally come! I wanted to find a good simulator that was simple and efficient to install and would run on nearly any platform.

A quick Google search yielded the Museum of HP Calculators, which offered a package developed by Torsten Manz of an HP-15C simulator written in Tcl/Tk. Download it here.

This was great, and Torsten has done a fantastic job with his simulator. I found a couple of things that I wanted to clean up, including the need to install a separate font in the Windows version. Next, I found Larry Smith's Tcl/Tk Wiki that talks about HP calculator simulators and provided his modification to Torsten's code that removed the requirement to install a separate font. So I downloaded it and tried it out...

Still there were a few things that I didn't like so I started experimenting with the Tcl/Tk code and found sites such as the Tcl/Tk wiki helpful. They have a great site explaining how to compile Tcl/Tk scripts to executables for almost any platform here. I found the freewrap method to be the easiest and most effective way to compile Tcl/Tk scripts.

One sticking point was generating icons... Telegraphics provides plug-ins to allow Photoshop CS2, CS3, etc. to read and write .ICO files. They also have an ICO generator that provides a command-line tool to combine different icon files together into a single file.

With these tools I finally had all I needed to produce my stand-alone HP-15C simulator... And you can download it here!

Visit Ed's Calculator Simulators links page.