The Story

At college in 1992 I met Nick, an electronics hobbyist, who introduced me to an acquaintance of his we called X. X was an American mathematics lecturer who was planning to write a book about a casino game called Punto Banco. Being a little technophobic, he wanted to enlist a programmer to help with his research. We began working immediately and over the next few months X divulged the secrets of probability theory to me while I wrote programs to perform the calculations and plot the graphs.

I then met another of Nick's friends with an interest in probability who wanted to take this research a step further. Together we conceived, designed and constructed a small electronic computer system based around the 8051, an 8-bit single-chip microcontroller, to calculate probabilities in real-time. My job was to produce the software for the device and these programs are the result.

The device was composed of three physical parts; the pocket-sized 8051 system itself; a one-handed, 4-button keypad for input; and a wafer-thin micro-speaker for output. The code is in C and was tested on a PC simulation (using Turbo C) before being compiled (using Micro-C) for burning into the 8051 EPROM.

A by-product of this work with the 8051 microcontroller was my 8051 Assembler/Linker.

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