Version 2.0.0

This is a major update.

During the changeover to program version 2.0, the individual utility programs were combined into a single program called lifutils for technical reasons. A LIFUTILS utility is now invoked by calling lifutils and specifying its name as the first parameter PROGNAME followed by all other parameters that are required by the utility. The parameter PROGNAME is case-insensitive which is important under Windows. The help text of the program lifutils shows which utilities were integrated. However, shell scripts are provided for Windows, Linux and macOS which, as before, allow a single utility to be called directly. Because of limitations of the Windows batch system it is not possible to use these scripts in Windows .bat or .cmd files.

Changes and enhancements:

• Most utilities can now read either from standard input or from an input file specified as a command line parameter. This eliminates the need for a cat or type at the beginning of a pipe.
• Many utilities now have a -r option to skip a LIF file header. Therefore, they can now use either a raw or a LIF file as input.
• comp41, decomp41, key41 and rom41cat can now handle the following Unicode characters: text append (hex 0x251c), Greek small mu (hex 0x03bc), angle (hex 0x2280), not equal to (hex 0x2260), Greek capital sigma (hex 0x03A3).
• The xrom file format was extended to allow alternative instruction names with Unicode characters.
• decomp41 now optionally adds line numbers to decompiled instructions.
• comp41 can now write a source and byte code listing on standard error and optionally create a LIF file instead of a raw file.
• The xrom files for HP41 peripherals are now combined in a single file called hpdevices.xrom.
• Xrom files were added for several HP application modules.
• There are numerous other improvements to comp41 and decomp41 that make compiling and decompiling FOCAL programs more versatile.
• More thorough validation of input files was implemented for lifput.
• The minimum and allocated number of registers is printed if a text file is converted to a LIF file for the HP-41 with textlif.
• rom41cat does not crash any more for ROM sizes > 4K.

Incompatibilities:

• Individual command line options have been changed for the following programs: comp41, decomp41, sdata, textlif and wall41.
• This version of the LIFUTILS can not be used with pyILPER versions prior to 1.8.10.

Binary distributions:

• The Windows packages were built and statically linked with VS 2022 on Windows 10. Also tested on Windows 11. The 32 bit package was not tested.
• The macOS universal package was built on Big Sur (Intel). Also tested on Sonoma and Sequoia (Intel). There were no tests on Mx hardware.
• The Linux package was built on Debian Bookworm.

Version 1.7.11

This release fixes an incorrect volume/header information generated by the programs rom41er, rom41hx and rom41lif in the LIF directory header of the output file. This error probably does not affect HP-IL operations on the HP-41 because this information is ignored.

Information on the binary packages:

• The Windows packages were built and statically linked with VS 2022 on Windows 10. Also tested on Windows 11. The 32 bit package was not tested.
• The macOS universal package was built on Big Sur (Intel). Also tested on Sonoma (Intel). There were no tests on M1 hardware.
• The Linux packages were built on Debian Bookworm.

Version 1.7.10

This release provides the following changes and fixes:

• The output of the program lexcat75 was enhanced and shows additional information about function parameters. The output format is now similar to the output of the HP-75 HELP lex file.
• The program lexcat71 does not show invalidated text table entries any more.
• The programs rom41er, rom41hx, rom41lif now use only the lower 10 bits to compute the checksum. The fix of rom41lif is important for all HP-41CL users because this respects the presence of speed bits in rom images.

You find installers for macOS and LINUX (Debian) below. See the Installation instructions how to proceed.

Version 1.7.9

This release provides the following changes and extensions:

• merged pull #3: make LIFUTILS build on non LINUX Unices, fix potential side effect in comp41.c (many thanks to the contributor)
• added -l option to relax file name checking, allow underscore in lif filenames
• documented the "-p" option for floppy disk access (LINUX only)
• Windows installer updates
• added textlif75 to create HP-75 text files from ASCII text files
• added lexcat75 to display information about HP-75 LEX files
• renamed text75 to liftext75 to be consistent with the LIFUTILS naming scheme (potential incompatibility)

You find installers for Windows (32 and 64 bit), macOS and LINUX (Debian) below. See the Installation instructions how to proceed.

Note: To use this version of the LIFUTILS with pyILPER you have to update to version 1.8.1 of that program.