12 Jul
2005
12 Jul
'05
10:46 a.m.
Rumor has it that David Betz may have mentioned these words:
I finally received my HHC Basic ROMs yesterday and they
seem to work.
(Thanks Roger!)
I *think* (and with the minimal remaining number of functional neutrons in
my head, that's a toughie! :-O ) I have everyone caught up on the HHC
Basics. To those people who were severely delayed on receiving their chips,
I publicly apologize -- It was never my intention to let this project go
"lax" like it did.
If I did forget you, please raise your hands! Then lower them again, and
type out an email to me, and I'll get you taken care of. I currently have a
couple of days of "minimal insanity" with which I can clean up any last
loose ends.
I do have a problem where it claims I have insufficient
memory to
save even the smallest program. I seem to remember hearing someone
else complain of that problem as well but I never saw anyone post a
solution.
That would've been me; I may have an idea to the cause, but I've not had a
chance to try it. See below.
Has anyone been able to save programs? Is there some
trick
involved? This is the first time I've used the machine and I suppose
there could be left over stuff in RAM that needs to be deleted.
I found that I could get 1 program entered and running, by manually
deleting everything I could find in the 'filesystem' and immediately going
to the Basic and setting it to program input mode. [[ This is the first
time I'd used the machine as well... ]]
However, there was other 'flakeyness' with my HHC as well, and so I don't
think it's a 'Basic-only' problem.
I would think it would have disappeared long ago
though since the
batteries were dead when I bought the machine and I am only able to
run it off of the power supply. Has anyone had success saving programs?
I *think* (and knowing near nothing about this machine, I really, really
stress *think*) that the batteries _need_ to be functional. A lot of
portable machines of this era used the batteries as an oversized 'smoothing
capacitor' for lack of a better term and would not operate correctly
without a working battery pack. (I have a Tandy 600 which exhibited
similar memory wackyness when running it from AC only with no battery pack
installed.)
I have not had time to test this theory, however, so I might be 'full of
condensed milk' as my father-in-law used to say.
Also, my machine has a menu entry offering to run SNAP
programs but I
have been unable to find a description of the SNAP language. I
believe it is a Forth derivative. Can someone point me to a
description of the SNAP language?
Wish I could; SNAP sounded kewl. What I can tell you is the machine uses a
CMOS 6502, so if anyone can find a way to read the internal ROMS or figure
out the BASIC enough to program a ROM dump utility, should be pretty easy
for one who's good with 6502 disassemblers to maybe glean some knowledge
about it. (M'self, I'm more a 6809 kinda guy...)
As I have some really good soldering/desoldering tools now, I could take a
stab at desoldering the ROM chip[s] and reading 'em directly... tho:
1) I wouldn't know where in memory it resides without manually tracing
address lines & whatnot (which I don't have time for) ... or ...
2) I wouldn't have time to do this for at least a couple of months. But
hey, we've been waiting almost 10 years now for Basic, right???
;^P
HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch at 30below.com |