I recently had a personal project that involved significant work designing a gear train, and in the end I downloaded CAD files from McMaster-Carr for much of it because it meant I got 3D-printed and laser-cut parts with standard metric moduli that could interoperate with off-the-shelf components like lead screws that I wasn’t capable of manufacturing myself.

The thing I didn’t like about Inkscape’s interface is that you can’t tell it, “give me a 63-tooth gear with an M3 profile”.

As some of you might guess, back in the 90s Casio had completely different PIM series for its internal (Japanese) and external markets. It made sense to focus on hand-written text recognition for the Japanese input, and it didn't make all that much sense for English/French/German/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish, where QWERTY/AZERTY/QWERTZ was clearly superior. So, you won't find Business Navigator on the Casio's Japanese website. But you can find something called "Casio Caleid Multimedia Navigator". Look closely, don't you think some of the icons are the same as on our BN-20?

(The photo comes from Yahoo Auctions)

A blog featured by @osnews in osnews.com/story/136806/casio-… claims that there used to be an SDK for it. Is it still up online somewhere? Is THAT the mythical SIM3020 mentioned in the SIM3022 documentation? Spoiler: yes!~

(cont)

Following the link trail, I arrived at two interesting destinations. One is a website about making Add-Ins for Caleid, and another is Casio's own website, offering a tool for making Add-Ins. The Caleid portal had one and only file preserved by the Internet Archive (bravo!), a 2.2 megabyte LZH archive with a Setup for the Add-In maker.

First, I discovered that the Setup program requires Windows 95 (luckily, I still have my Windows 95 hard disk image). Then I discovered that the Setup program requires a _Japanese_ Windows 95 - otherwise it crashes.

I was hoping to unpack the InstallShield Z archives with "unshield" tools, but the ones I've found did not handle CP-932 correctly and failed to unpack the installer. Can't be helped, time to get my PC-9821 laptop unpacked!

...turns out, it was the right call: the emulator _requires_ PC-98.

(cont)

Installer finished its job, and it became clear that the Casio Caleid SDK is likely one of the missing pieces I need to reverse-engineer my BN-20 organiser.

The Caleid SDK comes with SIM3020, the simulator for the exact CPU model used in the BN-20. This is significant, because NC3020 and NC3022 have 4KB of a built-in firmware that _must be_ different between the chips and probably contributes to incompatibilities.

SIM3020 is also significantly simpler. It doesn't have an MDI interface, or a complex ROM/RAM/Flash configurator. It isn't even a Windows program; it is a DOS program for a PC-98 series computer (that might work on DOS/V under Windows 95, according to the docs, but I couldn't make it).

Fun: despite being shipped as a device simulator for touchscreen-based XM-700, it also simulates a hardware keyboard.

(cont)

If SIM3020 is a DOS program, it should run under DosBox-X in PC-98 mode, right?

I switched my DosBox-X to PC-98 mode, thought hard and long about the program's complaints about EMS and XMS, and eventually came up with a DosBox configuration file that allowed the simulator to start. That's very neat.

(Protip: >16MB of RAM, both EMS and XMS, required; EMB is another name for XMS)

Time to look what's inside...

(cont)

Casio PVOS SDK ships with the OS in a single file, called BIOS. Caleid SDK comes chunked into multiple segments, each under 64KB (totally normal thing for an x86 embedded device, I suppose).

CPU.00/01 have the initial BIOS/bootloader; I haven't diff'ed it with the code from NC3022, but I suppose it is going to be somewhat different. There's very little code in it, though.

Then there's LIBINT; probably library for internalisation. Could it be a file that is different between Japanese and Western models? It has huge tasty bitmaps of numbers and days of week.

(cont)

Caleid.01 and .02 system files do not seem to feature anything interesting bitmap-wise at all, which is a major difference from how things are done on Casio BN-20 (that one was full of bitmaps). The Caleid SDK doesn't seem to ship with Caleid built-in software, either; there's no memo or spreadsheet in the OS files.

However, Caleid.03 and Caleid.04 system files hint that there is something called "LCD BIOS" and then there is a tool that asks the user to draw a kanji! Could it be that there's hand-written recognition tooling? In <256 KB of code? 🤔

I'm also extremely curious whether Caleid had a kanji font bank. I guess I might find out soon enough.

(cont)