UPDATE 2: I repeated my SOLVE benchmark (which makes heavy use of trig functions), this time after adding FIX 11 RND at the end of the function. The solution may be to make it stop iterating once the 20th digit has settled down (instead of going all the way) - or to change the transcendentals to be more accurate. I have to look into the SOLVE issue a bit more. I guess I could blame Free42's higher precision for part of that (assuming linear convergence, Free42 will take twice as many iterations to converge than the 42S, because its mantissa has twice the digits) but it probably has to do with the fact that the transcendental functions in Free42 Decimal are only accurate to about 20 digits, which means they behave erratically in the final stages of convergence - and that can force the solver to do dozens of additional iterations. SOLVE performs poorly, though - about 10 to 15 times slower than on the real 42S.
UPDATE: I ran a couple of quick-and-dirty tests on my Palm Zire 21, and SIN runs at about the same speed as on my real HP-42S INVRT is about 4 times faster than on the 42S. I'll run some tests and post the results here in a few days. As I said, I haven't done benchmarks yet, but I expect performance comparable to a real HP-42S on recent Palm models. Whether or not it is fast enough is something everyone should try for themselves. In practice, the Decimal version is still going to be significantly slower than the Binary.
Binary should be less on the Palm than it is on the PC, since even the Binary version has to do all its floating point in software on the Palm (using MathLib).
Theoretically, the impact of using Decimal vs. There is still some performance optimization left to do - replacing 32-bit operations by their 16-bit equivalents wherever possible - and that should help speed things up. Users will also be able to get ahold of a GIF file with the same info, copy the values and quickly insert them wherever they need, and is also capable of processing, sin, cos, tan, conversions, sums, etc.įree42 is one of the best applications out there for users that need to do many complex calculus and precision tasks.I haven't done any benchmarks yet, so I'm afraid I can't give you any numbers yet.įree42 Decimal for PalmOS does not use the 68k's BCD instructions it uses a set of C++ classes that implement base-10000 floating point using binary integer math.
Since the program is portable and doesn’t require installation, users will be able to take it anywhere they want, and another element of surprise is that it sports two calculators, one decimal, and one binary.Įven though it only displays several digits that are influenced by the function buttons that the users combine, it also allows them to put the results to good use, which means, export options enable them to save expressions in order to import and process them later, while even offering options to automatically have a log of operations saved to a text file. One of the best calculus applications for users that work with complex math expressions and precision tasks.įree42 is a useful utility that was designed to save users the time needed to calculate complex math expressions, based on the powerful HP-42S RPN scientific handheld calculator.