A free binary calculator designed for developers

WELCOME

Megatops BinCalc is a pure Int32 calculator designed for developers. It provides you a effective way to perform binary calculations or making base conversions.

BinCalc is FREE, and it looks very different to the other calculators. When I was staring the BinCalc project, I just want to design a UI cool enough to scare the binary "muggles" and avoid them touching it -- it is only for developers.

"There are only 10b types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't."

If you are a embedded system developer or low-level software developer, you might like it. It will rescue you from counting the 0/1s in the stupid Windows Calculator and help you to save the time wasted on parsing the hardware registers or converting from one base to another.

THE DESIGN

I design the BinCalc for two reasons:

• Input binary FAST and display binary CLEAR. I cannot suffer the pain of pressing "0/1" keys for 32 times like a fool, or counting the order of a tiny "1" in the mass of 0/1s.
• Input and display BIN/HEX/DEC in one interface. The worst thing when using a typical calculator is: after you entered a number, you suddenly found you just forgot to set the correct base first. So I want to input a number without setting the base and get the results in 3 bases immediately.

So, I finished this small tool: a pure Int32 calculator with bit indicators and 3 input panels. The most important part of BinCalc is the binary input panel:

It lets you input and read binary numbers in a graphical way. I'm sure you will like it if you must spend much time in calculating binary numbers just as me :)

And there is a mini binary indicator in the octal input panel to help you set the file permissions easily:

Besides helping you input binary FAST, BinCalc also helps you parse the binary numbers. It provides a bit ruler to help you parse the bit fields in hardware registers. And the ruler is customizable, you can choose a bit numbering scheme to fit your data-sheets.

Each bit has a tool-tip to show their order in the chosen bit numbering scheme and the value of 2^n (very useful in setting some base registers or setting MMU TLBs).

The binary input panel can even handle the IPv4 address! It makes calculating subnet masks or parsing the IP addresses in packet dumps easier:

BinCalc can export the result in various formats. You can copy the result in the desired format and paste it to your document or source code directly.

At last, BinCalc implemented a simple RPN calculator to storing the results or do some basic calculations. It is very simple, but just OK for regular use.

THE MOBILE VERSION

In fact, the Meagtops BinCalc was available in Palm OS earlier than the Windows version. After I had the idea, I finished the Palm OS version first so I can use it everywhere -- just take my old palm m515 from pocket and run it. The Palm OS version is very simple: no RPN calculator, but just a ALG bitwise calculator; and it does not supports octal.

But after I had more requests, I found it is hard to add more features to the Palm OS version, because the screen is too small to put more GUI controls on it. So after a year from I finished the Palm OS version, I decided to port it to the Windows platform, and the Palm OS version was discontinued.

REVISION HISTORY

Mar 23, 2011. v1.0.4:

• Fixed binary string copy bug

Dec 21, 2008. v1.0.3:

• Added ASCII char copy & paste support
• More hotkeys supported, see Readme.txt for detailed key-mapping info.

Nov 12, 2008. v1.0.2:

• Minor bugs fixed

Nov 8, 2008. v1.0.1:

• Shift left/right bug fixed:

  All shift operators are arithmetic now.

Aug 10, 2008. v1.0.0:

• Added IPv4 address support

• Added ASCII character input support

• Minor bugs fixed

Jun 28, 2008. v0.2g:

• Bit indicator tool-tips added 2^N value display

Dec 17, 2007. v0.2f:

• Minor bugs fixed

Nov 18, 2007. v0.2e:

• Added form position saving (supports multi-monitor)

• Added screen edge snapping

Nov 15, 2007. v0.2d:

• Added command line support (See CommandLine.txt)

• Added status save on close (in INI file)

Nov 8, 2007. v0.2c:

• Added keyboard support

• Fixed T register bug

Nov 6, 2007. v0.2b:

• Added octal support (UNIX file permission value friendly)

• Added separators in decimal display

• Added pop-up menu to switch bit label style

• Fixed some minor bugs

Feb 2, 2007. v0.1c:

• First Windows version

Dec 3, 2006. v0.1c:

• Last Palm OS version

Dec 25, 2005. v0.1:

• First Palm OS version

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Requirements:
Windows: Windows 2000/XP/2003
PalmOS: Palm OS 3.5+, OS5 Compatible; 50KB free RAM; Supports 160x160 and 320x320.

Current Version:
Windows: v1.0.4; PalmOS: v0.1c

Download: Local (Most recent version)  SOFTPEDIA