HES FORTH for VIC20 available?

[bdk6]

Back when my VIC 20 was still shiny and new I bought the HES FORTH cartridge. I still have the VIC, but sometime in the last 34 years the FORTH cartridge went missing. I have Googled and Googled 'til my Googler was sore trying to find another or an image, but so far had no luck. Does anyone know where I can find a cartridge for sale or an image of it?
Thanks.

[barrym95838]

Am I on the right track here?

https://ia600408.us.archive.org/14/item ... 82_HES.pdf

http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/ ... index.html

Mike B.

[bdk6]

Hi Mike,
Yes and no. The book on archive.org is the manual for the cartridge I seek. I have downloaded it already. The ROM image here for VIC Forth is the Datatronic version, which I also already have. Confusingly, there seem to have been two different VIC FORTHs sold at the same time: Datatronic and HES. Both are apparently based on FIG FORTH, but the HES version has specific VIC 20 words for accessing Kernel functions.

Thanks for finding those and presenting them here.
Will

[GARTHWILSON]

I never use Google, but here's what duckduckgo.com brings up, which may be different. It certainly looks like what you want should be there:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=VIC+20+HES+FO ... cal&ia=web

[nyef]

I have one of these cartridges... somewhere. I'll see if I can find and dump it.

Update: What I have turns out to be labelled "HES", "VIC FORTH", "by Tom Zimmer", "C 301", and "(c) 1982 Human Engineered Software". Is this what you were looking for, or were you looking for something else? Looks like the board has a 7400N(?) in plastic DIP and two windowed ceramic DIPs marked "HN462532G". Board is marked "8K01 SF82".

[bdk6]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

I never use Google, but here's what duckduckgo.com brings up, which may be different. It certainly looks like what you want should be there:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=VIC+20+HES+FO ... cal&ia=web

Thanks! One of those links led to a cartridge on ebay that wasn't there a couple days ago when I looked. I have been trying to convince myself it's worth $40 to me.

[bdk6]

nyef wrote:

I have one of these cartridges... somewhere. I'll see if I can find and dump it.

Update: What I have turns out to be labelled "HES", "VIC FORTH", "by Tom Zimmer", "C 301", and "(c) 1982 Human Engineered Software". Is this what you were looking for, or were you looking for something else? Looks like the board has a 7400N(?) in plastic DIP and two windowed ceramic DIPs marked "HN462532G". Board is marked "8K01 SF82".

That's the one! It should be an 8K cartridge. The "HN462532G" chips should be 4Kx8 ROMs. If you could dump it that would be great. GARTHWILSON pointed me toward one for sale on ebay (above) but I haven't yet convinced myself it's worth $40, especially since I will have to dump it to use with my hardware anyway.

Thanks!

Will

[nyef]

Well, that was a bit of an adventure.

Last night I managed to find (among other things) my HES VIC FORTH cartridge, and my VIC-1011A RS 232C adaptor. Today I dug out my VIC-20, managed to find the bits to get it talking to my (LCD flat-panel) TV, found out that the keyboard wasn't working worth a damn, took apart the keyboard and cleaned the contact areas (both on the PCB and the conductive-rubber pads) with IPA to get it working a bit more reliably, salvaged a male 25-pin D-sub connector from some old project in order to build a cable to connect to my terminal server, rebuilt a Linux kernel module so that I could talk to the terminal server again...

On the upside, aside from the keyboard, and one of the ports on my terminal server (I really need to build a loopback cable for that thing and map out which ports actually work properly), the hardware all worked. And the software wasn't too difficult to sort. The HES manual includes a definition on page 51 to direct output (but not input) to the serial port at 300 baud. Changing that to 2400 baud wasn't difficult. Then it turned out that the computer was sending CR but not LF, and my capture program was stripping out the CRs even after using them as a cursor control (wtf?), so there was some lossage there, but nothing that couldn't be sorted out by post-processing the capture file with an emacs keyboard macro. "A000 2000 DUMP" did most of the damage, plus some editing to clean up a few spots where there were errors in the serial data stream (I don't think that I've had that happen to me before, but this is the first time in a long time I've worked with anything slower than 9600), and I had a textual dump of the cartridge memory space.

From there, ": FOO 0 C000 A000 DO I C@ + LOOP . ; FOO" on the VIC-20 side got me a simple checksum of the ROM space, and some quick work in SBCL had the textual dump parsed into a Lisp list, checksummed for verification, and then written out to a binary file. Phew!

... And it turns out that I have a 5-pack of edge connectors for the VIC-20 "user port". The pitch for which is completely incompatible with basically anything that I might want to use, which probably means soldering the pins to a chunk of ribbon cable if find something to do with them.

Anyway, aside from arranging for bdk6 to obtain a copy of the final file, is there anything else that I should be doing with it?

[bdk6]

WOW! I had no idea it would be that much work or I wouldn't have asked. I really do appreciate it. Now I have to put it to good use to make your efforts worthwhile.

Thanks,
Will

PS I booted it up in VICE and it seems to be working just fine.

[commodorejohn]

...you cleaned your keyboard with an India pale ale?

[barrym95838]

commodorejohn wrote:

...you cleaned your keyboard with an India pale ale?

Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

Mike B.

[nyef]

bdk6 wrote:

WOW! I had no idea it would be that much work or I wouldn't have asked.

Don't worry about it. This was fun, I didn't end up building anything with active components or crazy software (such as an Arduino-based PC bridge over the disk drive (IEC?) port), I didn't have to buy anything in the way of parts, and I got a few ideas and a possibly-still-useful cable out of it. If I hadn't had the RS232 adaptor for the user port, though, then it would have tended towards a lot more hassle.

... It's just too bad about the completely stupid pin pitch on the port connectors, and the way that the machines only have one user port.

commodorejohn wrote:

...you cleaned your keyboard with an India pale ale?

IsoPropyl Alcohol. d-:

On the other hand, the last time I "cleaned" a keyboard with wine was an accident... and I ended up having to replace the entire computer... and the wine glass.

[rpiguy2]

There is one for sale on eBay right now. It was called VIC Forth, not HES Forth, which may have foiled your Googling.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Commodore-Vic- ... Sw20JZgJOL

Does running Forth from the cartridge slot limit you to only 3.5K? Can you install a memory expansion and still use a cartridge?

[edx]

nyef wrote:

Anyway, aside from arranging for bdk6 to obtain a copy of the final file, is there anything else that I should be doing with it?

The HES VIC FORTH cartridge is on the 'rare list' and unavailable even as a binary dump for use with VIC emulators. I'm sure Forth fans and Commodore sites would welcome a copy of the dump. In the early 2000's I contacted Tom Zimmer author of HES VIC & 64Forth seeking permission to release the latter publicly and he was more than happy to do so.

[nyef]

So, while I distinctly remember not being able to find a binary dump of the cartridge online, some quick digging suggests that the cartridge is "common" rather than "rare"? Either way, while I have no problem with sending the file to some person or organization that will deal with it appropriately, I have no idea who or what that might be.

Also, some idea of the "rare" and unavailable cart lists might be nice. I don't have many Vic-20 carts, but if I have something not otherwise available I can see about dumping them.