Enter RPN: R47: MyMenu

The Default

R47 post-RESET screenshot

When you first turned your R47 on, you saw a screen much like the one here, but what concerns us now is the menu at the bottom. It is called MyMenu, and it is special.

There are several ways to bring it up. In order of increasing desperation and destructiveness:

hold the 🟦 key for about a second¹
press EXIT repeatedly²
🟧 CAT MENUS M 🟧 MyMenu
🟦 CLR 🟦 RESET
remove the simulator’s backupR47.cfg file

While this stock menu initially appears useful, if you use the R47 long enough, it should strike you as disappointingly familiar. It’s just a copy of the first row of 🟧-shifted functions! Surely the purpose of MyMenu cannot be merely to save us a single shift prefix?

On observing that all roads lead to MyMenu, there is an implied promise of more interesting things to be built atop that prime real estate. Does the R47 deliver?

Yup!

Ribbons: Overriding the Bland Default

The R47 ships with several MyMenu presets for you to choose from, called “ribbons.”³ Access this selector via:

🟦 KEYS RIBBONS

You can return to the default depicted above with the M.R47 item, but why settle for that when you can instead have…

M.CPX: complex numbers {DRG, CC,⁴ eⁱˣ, eˣ, 𝓲⦿, 𝓲}
M.ENG: engineering {𝓲, CPX, π, MATX, TRG, eˣ}
M.FIN: finance {%, Δ%, yˣ, x², 10ˣ, FIN⁵}
M.FIN+: alternative to above, not a complement {%+MG, %T, %, Δ%, TVM, FIN}
M.SAV: gathers primary file I/O features from 🟧 PREF and 🟦 I/O: {DMCP, ActUSB, SAVE, LOAD, SAVEST, LOADST}
M.SAV+: same as previous, but with WRITEP and READP in the middle two positions

The purpose behind the other stock MyMenu presets are not as clearly defined:

M.C47: Four of these six items — {yˣ, x², 10ˣ, eˣ} — correspond to the first row of 🟧-shifted functions in the current C47 simulator. The two others (in the F1 and F6 spots) exist to paper over a limitation in the C47 keyboard owing to the desire to use the primary keys of the DM42 unchanged. They needed spots for the DRG and 𝓲⦿ functions, and they landed here.

(The keyboard and faceplate rearrangement in the R47 allowed the developers to give these functions better spots there.)
M.C47+: This appears to be someone’s personal choice of features they wanted faster access to than the C47 layout allowed. Three of the items did later earn spots on the R47 layout — {DRG, R↑, x!} — and two are settings the collector must have wanted surfaced: DSP and dℤ.0. The sixth is the flip-flag function (FF) which brings up a submenu that gives quick access to the calculator settings.
M.R47+: This appears to be a rethinking of the above to avoid wasting the three spots that landed on the R47’s final layout. What you get instead in those spots are {STOPW, LOOP, TEST} which suggests it was picked by an RPN programmer who occasionally uses their R47 as the world’s nerdiest stopwatch.

Ribbons replace only the bottom row of MyMenu. Any items you ASN on the two rows above persist, which brings us to…

The True Purpose of MyMenu

You may be aware already that the R47 allows completely overriding the contents of any menu while in USER mode via its ASN feature. We are now going to combine these ideas by merging a suite of R47 programs with one of its predefined ribbons to produce a useful whole.

The easy path is to download my OpAmp.s47 state file and 🟦 I/O 🟧 LOADST it into your R47. That Makefile-driven process produces that state file automatically, but to better understand what it does and why, let’s take the hard manual path.

RESET your simulator, then READP the OpAmp.p47 file in, and try this key sequence:

🟦 KEYS RIBBONS 🟧 M.SAV+
long-press 🟦 to bring that new menu up
🟦 ASN 🟧 CAT PROGS RJnoise EXIT 🟧 F1
🟦 ASN 🟧 CAT PROGS Vos     EXIT 🟧 F2
🟦 ASN 🟧 CAT PROGS Gni     EXIT 🟧 F3
🟦 ASN 🟧 CAT PROGS Ginv    EXIT 🟧 F4
🟦 ASN 🟧 CAT PROGS ||R     EXIT 🟧 F5
🟦 ASN 🟧 CAT PROGS Rdiv    EXIT 🟧 F6
🟦 ASN 🟧 CAT PROGS _INIT   EXIT 🟦 F6

That overlays these seven functions above the M.SAV+ ribbon to produce a useful whole.

The linked T47 script merely automates all this.

For those taking the manual path, it may be useful to know that the sequence 🟦 ASN ENTER is a prelude to clearing one of these spots by assigning the NULL function to it. To clear the entire thing including the ribbon row, say instead 🟦 KEYS RESETS MyM.R.

You can now run these programs from MyMenu by selecting them by the assigned softmenu keys. Start by running the _INIT function once, after which it does not need to be repeated. (Thus why I put it way up in the corner of MyMenu, out of the way.)

The R47’s ASN feature has broader uses, such as overriding stock menus while in USER mode, but MyMenu works regardless. If you leave space for the “ribbon” on the bottom row as in our example above, you have 12 spots to assign to functions you want available at the root of the R47’s menu system. If you are willing to override that lower row as well, you get 18 spots.

(Sorry, custom user menus cannot scroll. If you want multiple pages, you have to define another menu and call out to it, as is done in the P.FN thru P.FN3 sequence.)

Loose your creativity! 👨‍🎨

(You may now wish to return to my R47 article index.)

License

^{^} This key has “MyM” printed above it on the simulator, but “CUST” on the R47 hardware, indicating a schism where one faction favored calling this the “custom” menu instead.
^{^} It will take no more than 8 presses, being the size limit of the menu stack. MyMenu is always at this stack’s base as long as the MyMb flag remains set. I deliberately disabled that flag in my HP-15C emulation example, but notice that it doesn’t disable all menus, merely MyMenu.
^{^} One presumes it is a reference to the UI feature that debuted in Microsoft Office 2007 wherein a strip of screen real estate that previously had a single well-defined function now changes completely, on command. That’s not a terrible analog for what this R47 feature does, though switching is more intentional on the R47 than in Office.
^{^} This is a WP43-ism. Its Ccomplex Compose function is not identical to the more simply named COMPLEX operation on the R47, but the essence is the same.
^{^} …where we find % and Δ% again, indicating that this menu wasn’t all that well thought-out