Release Notes
Changes in Release 5.3.3
Added a PAM/GO ROM option to the preferences dialog.
Changes in Release 5.3.2
Added file creator and printer margin preferences, and made most preferences take effect immediately. Also cleaned up the H-17 mount preferences dialog somewhat.
Added select / copy / paste to the H-19. You can select text in various ways to copy to the clipboard, and paste text from the clipboard into the H8 as if that text were being typed at the keyboard.
Scrolling using the scroll-bar slider is now live; the screen content moves as you move the slider.
A small number of other minor user interface tweeks are included, such as color icons for the on-screen indicators.
Changes in Release 5.3.1
Fixed a problem in the H-19 where the scroll-back buffer could not be saved if the top line was non-blank.
Added these scroll-back features:
Changes in Release 5.3.0
Added a 476-line scroll-back buffer to the H-19, with the ability to save both the buffer and the active screen (500 lines, total) to a Macintosh text file.
Added an optional comment, ";check: nnn", to the portable disk format. The emulator adds this comment when creating a portable disk, and if it is present when a disk is loaded, compares nnn with the calculated sector body check byte. If the values don't match, the disk is not mounted. Ref: Error Messages.
The diskdump program, available on the web site, was also modified to add this comment to the disk image, ensuring the user that the dumped image is sound.
Changes in Release 5.2.1
Minor tweaking.
Added error dialogs for three malformed disk header problems that were previously "silent" disk insertion failures.
Added interesting operations statistics to the About window, at the cost of a slight reduction in Turbo-mode performance.
In the H-17 Management dialog, moved the volume number to the same line as the disk label (ref: Window menu).
Added help sections on Boot.abs, low-level H-17 driver calls, and 8050 UART programming and cleaned up various errors in other sections in my ongoing efforts to get it right.
Changes in Release 5.2.0
Added features to the printer:
Changed the LP: driver to support this change in the emulated printer.
Fixed a small bug in H-19 that caused the occasional character on the right side of the window to be written on the H8 front panel instead of the H-19 window.
Changes in Release 5.1.1
Added the disk volume number and label to the H-17 Management window; refer to Emulator Menus for more information.
Changes in Release 5.1.0
Changed pacing to work in machine cycles instead of instruction counts, providing emulation of the H8's actual speed.
Added speed gradients of 2 mhz, 4 mhz, and 8 mhz, in addition to Turbo (unpaced).
Made a number of changes to the menu system; refer to Emulator Menus for more information.
The H-17 Management window is now a normal window, not a dialog box. The emulator will continue to run with this window open.
Changed the About window so that the emulator will continue to run with it open.
Added a new Hold Mode screen indicator to tell you when Hold Mode is enabled but not holding. (ref: H19 Keyboard Map, On Screen Indicators)
Added a new Emulator Preferences dialog box that allows you to select the default cursor type (underline or block) on the H-19 and the default processor clock rate.
Added a new "Remember Window Positions " item on the window menu. When enabled, the Front Panel, H-19 and H-17 Management window positions will be recorded when the emulator quits. The windows will be in the remembered positions the next time the emulator is started.
Eliminated the "select window to hide it " logic and added a new Hide Window item to the file menu. Also added a close box to all normal windows.
If you are using the original HDOS 2.0 disk driver, you should not change the system speed default from 2 mhz because the old driver can't boot at higher speeds. You may select a higher default clock rate if you are using HDOS 1.6 or the HUG replacement disk driver with HDOS 2.0.
Changes in Release 4.2.6 & 4.1.6
Corrected end-of-line character sent when an input FTP file doesn't end in carriage return. It's now properly received as a NL character.
Changes in Release 4.2.5 & 4.1.5
Corrected a coding error, introduced in release 2.2, that was causing a crash under OS 8.1.
Changes in Release 4.2.4 & 4.1.4
Fixed a problem with H-19 responding to flow control (XON/XOFF) sent by the H8; a real H-19 does not respond to flow control received on the serial interface.
Changes in Release 4.2.3 & 4.1.3
Fixed a problem with H-19 window scrolling when the H-19 isn't the front window or the H8 isn't the front application.
Changes in Release 4.2.2 & 4.1.2
Fixed a problem in the H19 emulator. With the cursor on line 25, a cursor-home sequence (Esc HCUH) should send the cursor to line 1 column 1, but it was moving to line 25 column 1 instead.
Changes in Release 4.2.1
Note that this is a PowerPC only release.
Fixed a problem that was causing a bad character to be transmitted when you pressed the Enter key on the H-19 numeric keypad in normal or shifted mode.
This problem does not exist in release 4.1.
Added a new "H8 Programming Information " page and several subpages to the Help system. The subpages include full documentation of Benton Harbor Basic, the assembler, the HDOS API and a low-memory MAP.
Changes in Release 4.2
This version is PowerPC native; it will no longer run on a 68K machine.
Converted the source from the MetroWerks Codewarrior development environment to the Apple MPW development environment.
Cleaned up a couple of messages and prettied the About box just a little.
Changes in Release 4.1
There have been a number of performance improvements made to interrupt handling and 8080A emulation to help out slower machines. Got something on the order of a 30% increase in raw processor speed.
The performance improvements made Turbo Mode nearly unusable on fast machines, so I added pacing to the H-19 terminal to hold it down to 2,000 characters per second, maximum. Turbo Mode now speeds the processor only, as it was supposed to do in the first place.
Fixed a bug in I/O: received break was not an interrupt-causing condition. It is now.
Fixed a coding problem in the system scheduling loop: we were repeatedly adding the timing record to the system time queue when this was unnecessary. It is now added once, removed once, and primed every 1ms.
Changes in Release 4.0
The emulator now allows H8 software to access and use the Macintosh modem. The configuration is fixed at 9600bps and there are some other restrictions. Please see Emulator Features for details.
The emulator now supports the HUG enhanced SY: driver written by Dean Gibson of Ultimeth Corp. This adds support for double-sided disks and for 80-track disks, increasing per-drive storage capacity to up to 400 K/bytes. There are significant performance improvements as well. The HUG SY: driver is available on the Heath8080A web site.
The emulator provides "Turbo Mode " which effectively disables processor pacing. On fast Macintosh systems without Turbo Mode, the emulator is held to 315,000 8080A instructions per second and performs benchmarks in approximately the same amount of time as a real H8. With Turbo Mode, there is no instruction-per-second cap; the emulator will perform at the maximum speed possible on the host Macintosh system.
See Emulator Menus for more information on Turbo Mode, including some cautions.
A Reset button was added to the Manage Diskettes dialog box allowing easy use of the HDOS 'reset' command. If you insert a disk into a drive or click the Reset button, hole detection is suppressed for 300ms. HDOS is able to see the disk stop spinning then start spinning again, allowing very natural use of the HDOS 'reset' command.
Various small "tuning " adjustments were made that have no visible effect on emulator operation.
Changes in Release 3.1
Added 'alternate keypad mode' support to the Mac arrow keys to better suit the requirements of programs (like PIE) that use this mode. For details, refer to H-19 Programming Information, Extra Mac Keys.
Cleaned up some errors and formatting problems in these help files, and added information in a number of places, most notably a fairly comprehensive summary of the 8080A processor.
Changes in Release 3.0
Added near-complete H-19 Video Terminal emulation. For details, refer to H-19 Keyboard Map and User Guide and H-19 Programming Information.
Replaced the too-long and irritating "boop " noise with a "click. " This is the sound played after you've entered the 3rd digit on the H8 front panel.
Changes in Release 2.3
The H8 can now print directly to the Mac printer. Operation is automatic; you no longer have to open a print file before printing.
File transfer to and from the Macintosh is now automatic. The Save File As and File Open dialogs open automatically when you copy to or from the AT: driver.
The LP: and AT: drivers have been rewritten to support these features. You must use the new LP: and AT: drivers with emulator release 2.3. A driver source code disk is included with the package.
The emulator now requires 5 megabytes of memory. The extra space was necessary to ensure that there were no problems with the Macintosh print package (something of a memory hog, we're told).
Changes in Release 2.2
The emulator now supports diskette mounting preferences. Please refer to the Edit menu in Emulator Menus for more information on this feature.
You can now insert a diskette into a free drive by opening the diskette file in the Finder. There must be a free drive for this feature to work; if you want to use the feature, make sure that you leave one or more drives free in your Preferences, e.g., set the drive preference to None.
You can now open a PAM/8 tape file for input by opening the tape file in the Finder.
Changes in Release 2.1
Added background operation. When the H8 is not the front application, it will run for 10ms between calls to WaitNextEvent. It will also update the front panel LEDs every 10ms. When the H8 is the front application, it will make these calls every 30ms, which is an increase from the previous version.
Added 'TEXT' and 'hfdr' resources to provide a description to the Apple System Profiler application.
Fixed the duration of PAM/8's tones under System 9.1. The "boop " that occurs after the entry of the 3rd digit is still too long, but it's as short as I can get it until I can get a fix from Apple.
Increased the H-19's character-gathering time window from 1ms to 5ms to reduce overhead and boost performance. Terminal performance increased by approx. 50% on the author's system.
Fixed the mount problem with uninitialized disks. You can now create and dismount a disk without initializing it. The next time you mount it, HDOS will still consider the disk to be uninitialized.
Fixed the problem that was causing the last line to apparently be lost when transferring text from the Mac to the H8. If a text file does not end in Carriage Return, one will be appended before we return EOF to the AT: driver.