☰ pyILPER

pyILPER Features

HP-IL (Hewlett Packard Interface Loop) is a serial interconnection bus introduced by Hewlett-Packard in the early 1980s. It enabled the communication between peripheral devices such as printers, floppy disk drives, etc. with programmable calculators such as the and HP-41C, HP-71B, and HP-75C/D.

Today, in addition to the original parts that are still functional, there are several software emulations of HP-IL controllers (HP-71, HP-75 and HP-41) and devices (printers, mass storage devices, plotters, etc.), as well as microcontroller-based emulations of HP-IL peripheral devices.

There are two ways to connect these devices to each other:

  • the HP-IL (hardware) loop for connecting original devices and microcontroller-based device replicas
  • The virtual HP-IL over TCP/IP, which is used to connect software-based emulations of controllers and devices and runs on a PC.

To bring these two worlds (real and virtual HP-IL loops) together, Jean-Francois Garnier created an HP-IL to USB converter (PIL-Box) to link a PC via a USB virtual serial device to an HP-IL loop.

Emulators of HP calculators like EMU71 or V41 can be attached to pyILPER via the TCP/IP interface:

In addition, there is a so-called socket interface that can be used to connect to the HP-41, HP-71, and HP-75 emulators created by J.F. Garnier running in a DOSBox.

Pyilper version 2 supports multiple interfaces simultaneously, allowing different real and emulated HP-IL controllers or devices to be combined into a single virtual loop via the various interface types.

pyILPER itself includes emulations of numerous HP-IL peripheral devices. These are:

The LIFUTILS' is a set of tools to handle various LIF (Hewlett Packard Logical Interchange Format) files and media images. Most of them are integrated into the pyILPER user interfaces to make it easier to work with virtual mass storage devices.