"gaming" H8

[Glenn Roberts]

So I may have to eat my own words.  I recently opined here that there was little need for an H8 “expansion chassis” and yet I seem to have pretty much filled one up!:

 

This is the machine I will use to demonstrate H8 “gaming” at VCF East:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Zi1w5sUqFr3tj8fp7

 

It has:

                “New” (Rev 2.6) Z80 CPU board w/RAM

                HA-8-2 NOGDS Music Synthesizer board

                HA-8-3 NOGDS multifunction/graphics board (w/ arithmetic processor installed)

                USB board

                “New” H37/67 interface board

                H-8-4 serial board

                First generation Z67 IDE board with dual 2G CF cards (HDOS 2 and CP/M)

 

I still like to use the older, first generation IDE board sometimes because it lets me install the compact flash reader right in the chassis.  It’s limited to 4mhz operation, but I won’t be running this machine fast anyway.

 

I had to install the CPU in slot two because there’s just not enough clearance from the ribbon cables on the front panel (good reason to replace the front panel with the new design, though I won’t be doing that on this system any time soon).  I plan to install my Rev 3.1 CPU board which will eliminate the need for the USB and H-8-4 boards since those functions are built into the CPU board.  Once I do that, I’ll focus on configuring the software.  The cable spaghetti mess will get worse because I still need to install game paddles and/or joysticks…  will post pix/videos once this is all configured and (hopefully) operational.

 

 

• Glenn

 

[Les Bird]

Wow! Impressive system. Should be fun showing it at VCF.

Les

[Les Bird]

On the topic of gaming on the H8 I hope you show off Gravitron. It was my favorite game on the Heathkit computers and I played Gravitar at the arcades all the time. I tweeted about Gravitron earlier this month:

https://twitter.com/lestopher13/status/1425958793247133700?s=20

Les

[Glenn Roberts]

I’ll put together a list of games that I know of and post here to see if I forgot any.  Many of these I never played back then so I’ll have to learn!

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[Mitchell Smith]

What are you guys using for a terminal to run games?

Every time I try to run anything with graphics using the H19 terminal emulator, the emulator just crashes and closes itself.

Running George Farris' H19term V2.5. under Ubuntu.

Mitch

[glenn.f...@gmail.com]

George is on the list.  He would probably be happy to help.  A while back he had a bunch of us try to break it and that  led to bug fixes and improvements I believe.  Hopefully he can find any issues.

 

I primarily still use an actual H19…

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[Mitchell Smith]

If anyone can break something it's me.

When I get home from work in a few weeks I will try to address this with George. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I still kick myself for somehow losing my H19 terminal. No idea what happened to it.

[Douglas Miller]

It may not be worth the effort to get setup, but I have a JAVA H19 emulator that I use for my simulations. There's a serial version:

http://sebhc.durgadas.com/mms89/H19serial.jar

and one that uses telnet (TCP/IP socket) and is handy for cases where you have a telnet-serial module on the H8:

http://sebhc.durgadas.com/mms89/H19telnet.jar

The tricky part is getting the serial version setup, as JAVA has no native support for serial ports. You'll have to install a third-party JAVA jar and get the classpaths correct. Let me know if you're interested, and I can walk you through the setup.

This might give you another datapoint, at least.

Doug

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[Les Bird]

If this helps I just posted a Linux version of my H19 emulator up on SEBHC here:

https://sebhc.github.io/sebhc/

I don't have a Linux device to test it though so if you try it and it doesn't work let me know.

Les

[George Farris]

Yes let me know, I'm quite busy until Sept 16th or so myself but it may be something easy to fix.

George

[glenn.f...@gmail.com]

Well my attempts to swap in the Rev 3.1 board for the 2.6 were a failure.  I can’t get that board to boot from the older Z67 IDE board.    Wondering if it is coming up running at some speed higher than 2 Mhz?  and then my mind goes back to all our discussions about the 2 ms clock and that board…  for now I’ll stick with the older 2.6 board and the cluttered cabinet… because it works!  (but curious if anyone knows why this failed?)

[glenn.f...@gmail.com]

p.s. it works with the external Z67 IDE+.  Maybe time to retire the old internal IDE board 😊.  Of course it could just be the ribbon cable…

 

but this is a much cleaner/cooler setup.  Just 4 boards: CPU, H37/67, HA-8-2 and HA-8-3.  Will test to make sure all the software works…

[Mitchell Smith]

Thank you Les and George. I'll let you know what happens.

Mitch

[norberto.collado koyado.com]

Interesting! It should work. I still have the old Z67-IDE and it is fully operational. Once I get my system up and running, I will check it out with the new CPU board.

Norberto

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From: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of glenn.f...@gmail.com <glenn.f...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2021 6:15 PM
To: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [sebhc] RE: "gaming" H8

 

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[Mark Garlanger]

I loved Gravitron, too. And when I saw Gravitron 2, it was even better.

Gravitron 2, can be played in your browser with my H89 emulator, written in javascript - https://heathkit.garlanger.com/emulator/jsH89/

It's on my todo list to update the page, so that any disk image can be used with the emulator. The graphics work good for that game, but there are

some issues when running Froggs.

Mark

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[Les Bird]

Mark,

The JS emulator is super cool. Nice job with that. I don't think I have Grav2 in any of the SEBHC archives. Where did you get it?

Les

[Mark Garlanger]

I can't seem to find where that particular disk image came from. It must have been a user disk that I imaged at some point. I'm not sure where the H17Disk or H8D version of that disk is, I just found the raw image that is there on the website. But I did find both a 400k CP/M image and a 400k HDOS image that both had GRAV and GRAV2 for the associated OS. There were some bad sectors during imaging of the CP/M disk, but not affecting these 2 programs. The HDOS had no errors. I'm attaching both the disks in both h17disk and h8d formats.

Mark

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[Les Bird]

Great! Thanks Mark!

Les