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Epson HX-20, $10 at the flea market

N

NathanAllan

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Joined
Jun 1, 2003
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Location
Bellevue, Colorado
I'm starting to think that the flea market here is not so bad. Two vintage computers in a month for $10 each is not bad at all.

This one is an Epson HX-20 with no pwer supply, but it looks totally new except where I used my key to make sure it has all of it's roms(it does) and that's not bad either. I have a universal charger that has lots of switchable settings, and I have set it to it's correct polarity, voltage, etc. I just switched it on for a second and its menu came up, so it's alive! Now I get to wait and see what peripherals show themselves.

Nathan
 
Wow Good Deal

Wow Good Deal

Sounds like you know where to find a bargain.I have been to one flea market in California. It was a good one. I am going to try to travel a little this summer so I am going to hit a few when I am on vacation.
Angel
 
I have been exploring this machine more, and at first it was giving me trouble. I kept getting garbage data on the lcd and beeping errors. I hit a few buttons and did my best to navigate around its menu and got to the screen where it asked me to set the date. It's definitely NOT Y2K compliant, it went back to making errors when I put in the year as 06. I put it in as 86 and now everything seems to work fine. It has BASIC, SkiWriter, and Monitor(?) in ROM and they al do something. I printed out a few things on the last little bit of paper it has in it with the last little bit of ink it had. I still have to get a tape for it (it hasthe cassette drive) to test that but I suspect it's going to check out good. Funny about this machine, it has two different kinds of serial ports, one rs232c and one that is supposed to be faster, both are DIN sockets, SERIAL has 5 pins and the rs232c has 8. The one marked SERIAL has a faster connection, according to the websites I read (Thanks Terry!) so I was actually thinking of some generic peripherals with homemade drivers for the BASIC that's there. I have the Basic book, might as well use it (if I can find something for using, say, an infrared adapter?). I even found a webpage that tells basically (no pun intended) how to talk to this thing through it's rs232port using LINUX!

One question: If this thing was made by Epson, would my Epson printer (LQ370) be able to communicate with it(no serial on the printer)?

Fascinating machine!

Nathan
 
I have it, but I don't have a disk drive for the HX. That's okay, I'm looking forward to building the cable to null over to the PC to transfer a bunch of files to the cassette onboard the HX. This thing has a following.
 
You can still buy the printer ribbons at OfficeMax, etc. Epson is still making printers of that design, included in a number of POS terminals. I haven't found a source for the little paper rolls, but it's a standard width, so creating your own mini rolls from a larger one should be a piece of cake.

--T
 
was there ever a telnet client or terminal program for this thing? I'd like to get it to talk to something else. And from what I have read, there are two empty rom slots on the inside, any idea where roms could be had? I know that's a longshot. It has a basic in it, and I want to try to get it to talk to a modem. I have one that will dial down a lot that I think I can use on all these machines.
 
Actually, there is only one expansion ROM socket, and yours is already populated with the SkiWriter chip, IIRC. There are other ROMs, but we'll probably never see them.
As for a comms program, the only one I've found is on the Epson FTP page I sent ya, but the gotcha is that (as I discovered the hard way, after laboriously typing-in the BASIC code), it only works if you have the RAM expansion module.

--T
 
Hmm. i don't have the expansion and probably will never see one. Are there any telnet or terminal programs around that are written in BASIC? I could probably use one of those. I'm trying to avoid transferring to microcassette, which has proven in the past to be a true PITA. Is there anything I can just retype? or a tutorial to make one? Time to hit the books. I'll see what I can come up with.
 
I'm still revisiting the books I have on BASIC for this thing (I don't have that particular manual, but I havea few) and am figuring much out about this thing.

About the batteries, the specs in the pdf file I got fot its manual says that the batteries are four sub-C 1.2v at 1100mah nicd. I have four 1.2v 2650mah nimh AA sized cells. I can easily drop these in with a holder. I'm pretty sure it'll work but I wanted to run this by y'all first. Does the physical size really matter?

I'll have more questions later, just one at a time.

Nathan
 
I've read somewhere on the net that somebody successfully replaced the battery pack with AA cells, but I haven't tried it myself. You will probably have to experiment with charging times so as to not under- or over-charge them.

--T
 
After a few recharges (on the original battery) I find I can run it for about 8 hours before I need to recharge, give or take one hour. This is good but the batteries still need replacing, so I am going to proceed. Unfortunately I have to order the battery holder for it, but that's okay.

I got the RealVoice module from Terry (WOOHOO! Thanks!) I told my mother and she got me to leave her a voicemail of Stephen Hawking asking her for her chili recipe :) Seriously, the module makes the computer much more usable. Still doing my homework on it. There's a port on top that is still a mystery to me, but I'll figure it out.

Has anyone ever made any homebrew items for this thing? I'd lke to see what I can do with the cart slot. It's for ROMS that are rarer than the rest of it, so it's homebrew time.

The cassette module for it works great, but only when it's fully charged. Otherwise it gives me an I/O error. Needs batteries. Too easy. Also working on making custom cables for telnetting stuff. Gotta communicate!
 
I have some kinda light-board thinggy (120x red LEDs), that jacks into the port on the RealVoice. I haven't yet figgered out it's purpose, but I have been able to make the lights blink in different ways by expirementing with the RealVoice menu options. It's some kinda AdaptiveTechnology, and mebbe I'll find some info on it someday.

--T
 
I almost purchased a HX-20. Glad I reread this thread first. I thought the PX-8 was a pain. Looks like it's a piece of cake compared to the HX-20. At least the PX-8 comes with a built-in TELECOM program. I did have to make my own serial/rs232c cable using a MAC male-male din cable cut in half for the PX-8. Works like a champ.
 
Yes on HX-20 printer ribbons! They are available all over the place! Surprising.

Ok. Ok. The HX-20 had such a low starting bid.... We will see if anyone else is dying to buy one.
 
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I haven't been able to find any telecom roms for this thing. I looked in my pdf manual and there is some way to activate CP/M programs stored in memory from MONITOR. Here's what's on the screen:

A=00 B=00 X=D77E
C=C4 S=04AF P=D23B

I don't see anything like programs and those look like memory locations to me.

I've been looking around and for some reason I can't find any programs that are written in MS Basic 1.0 for using the serial port! Frustrating! Does anyone have a direct link? I found one that tells how to connect it to a Linux box, and I did everything as it said but the cable. It said to make it with full handshaking :(

I tried making a basic null modem cable for it but apparently still have to work on it. I didn't use any handshaking and used only the TXD, RXD and GND lines. It didn't work. Apparently it needs to have the handshaking present. I only did it this way(with three lines) cause that's what hardware I have on-hand. I *never* thought I'd be using those 3-pin DIN plugs for anything and it looks like I was right. When hooked up to the win95 laptop using hyperterm all I got was one character (junk data).

Terry, that blinkenlights add-on sounds like some kind of tester thing, so you can see if the pins are all hooked up (?) My guess. I also got a standard paper roll from work and ONE of those rolls will make TEN for the Epson, so I'll have no shortage of paper!

There's a place right down the street from me that seems to have all the printer ribbons in existence, but I keep missing their hours. I'll get one eventually.

Nathan
 
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The HX-20 does not have any CP/M, in ROM or otherwise. It's a Motorola 68xx-based machine, so CP/M is not even an option. All that's in the main ROM is BASIC and the Monitor program. The display you see when you select the monitor from the menu is just a dump of the (master) CPU's registers:

A = A(ccumulator) (8-bit)
B = B reg (8-bit)
X = (inde)X reg (16-bit (when combined with Y reg))
C = C(ondition Code) reg (8-bit) aka Flags in some micros
S = S(tack Pointer)
P = P(rogram Counter)

The values in the regs can be edited to enter ML code of your own.

--T
 
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Monitor is about the same as "debug" in MS-DOS land. It lets you do all that "machine language" type stuff, read files into memory, move memory around, clear memory, change registers, save memory to files, alter next "program counter location", etc.



Oooo, look. Terry and I both posting away at the same time.
 
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