HP 2645 Terminal - Part 4: The First 8-Bit Gaming Console?

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This is a multi-part series for HP and terminal lovers, focusing on the HP 264x terminal series from 1974-1982. In this episode, we manage to load and play (really good!) games on this 8-bit terminal from 1975. Would that make it the first 8-bit personal gaming station?
Documents, font maps and ROM dumps at:
www.curiousmarc.com/computing...
00:00 Intro
00:51 Intel 8080 inside!
01:37 Binary loader backdoor
05:18 Recovering the game code
08:27 Recreating the game tapes
09:54 Loading the game tapes
10:20 Space Invaders
10:36 My menu driven multi-game tape
11:28 Hac-Man
12:13 Pong
13:13 Keep On Drivin'
13:58 Missile
15:01 Maze and Dragon
16:19 The first gaming console?
Cleaned up game files, ready to play on the 2645, are on my website:
www.curiousmarc.com/computing...
Here are the links to the original sources I found for the game files:
Games for HP 2648 (8080 processor), from Martin Hepperle:
ftp://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/hp/hp2648/
Games for HP 2644 (8008 processor):
ftp://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/hp/hp2644/
Some HP 2648 games hidden in the 2645 firmware folder on bitsavers:
bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/terminal/...
Other games including Maze and Shooter games, quite corrupted, unknown origin:
newton.freehostia.com/net/term...

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22 июл 2024

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Комментарии : 111

@DanielPalmans 6 лет назад

I LOVE your videos! It brings me back so many memories! I started working @hp in 1975 as a customer engineer, and I do remember all these terminals very well. and btw I'm still @hp :-)

@theshowman8478 5 лет назад

Wow. This brings back memories ! I was a programmer on HP3000 during the 80's and early 90's and we used to play space invaders (during lunch break of course ;-) ) . Watching this, had completely forgot about the car racing game. Also remembered yahtzee (the dice game) and we (me and fellow programmers) used to play this at lunch time and gambled (when the managers weren't around :-) , naughty, naughty). Those escape sequences were great fun and very useful. I really got into these and used them to develop a visual display monitoring the connection status between 50 HP3000's (in London for London Buses). Happy times.

@shyleshsrinivasan5092 5 лет назад

These demonstrations are priceless ! Hats off to the species of humans like yourself sir, preserving these machines !

@nickwashburn723 5 лет назад

amazing your channel only has 35k subs.. keep up the great videos man.. some of us DO appreciate the hell out of this stuff. Thanks!

@colinsmith6480 6 лет назад

Fascinating, thank you for the video

@amrkoptan4041 6 лет назад

where have you been we missed your videos alot!! this one made my day

@0fend0 6 лет назад

So interesting. Subbed!

@compu85 3 года назад

The bell sound of that terminal is really nice!

@eekmeout 4 года назад

i would definitely like to see more "play with me" footage of you playing old, obscure games!

@johanrowe4364 6 лет назад

This still looks like fun, even now in 2018!

@zh84 6 лет назад

Amazing. I thought when you talked about playing games you were going to be connecting to an old mainframe to play Colossal Cave!

@soundguydon 6 лет назад

I'm always fascinated by old computer hardware/software. I got my first computer in 1983 and have never lost my fascination :) If I could, I'd have a dumb-terminal connected to my linux box.. For nothing other than the fun of it ;-) When I was in college, we connected to the mainframe via VT220 terms, and it was a lot of fun for me.

@nigelblake5679 6 лет назад

These were really great terminals, very heavy !, there was a cat and mouse game also I recall.

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

+Nigel Blake: I know of one called "Fatcat". I show it on the HP 85 at the end of this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lXrGFLu-wX0.htmlm6s . But I don't know how you would do it on a strictly character based HP 2645. At least I have not seen it.

@yorgle 5 лет назад

The characters used for Hac-Man reminds me of the game “Hunt”... which I played on our BSD Tahoe machines back in college ‘91-92 or so

@525Lines 6 лет назад

10:53 Reminds me of the good old menu.bat program. Anybody could write it for free and so handy.

@8088argentina 2 года назад

amazing

@youreperfectstudio7931 6 лет назад

Different technology, but I used to love playing Tetris For Terminals over dial-into Linux systems in the 90s

@totolastico 6 лет назад

fabuleuse machine !

@johnfalkenstine8377 5 лет назад

had an Altair store right across from my garage. As a mechanic, I found it interesting. The tape bit with the cassette drive I found not so good.

@amaxamon 4 года назад

My favorite kinds of games!

@OneSwitch 6 лет назад

Excellent video. Curious about the games. Do you have any more details on the shooting game, please? Looks Aircraft / Drop Zone 4 of 1975 inspired). Any details of the programmers etc. would be nice. Would love to get a copy if possible. Can't find it on-line (managed to find a tennis game though).

@Lumibear. 6 лет назад

The sound is amazing. Much beep, wow.

@johanlaurasia 6 лет назад

By the time that device was made, terminals were no longer made using discrete electronics, rather, it was essentially a general purpose computer with a single application. A similar thing happened with the Radio Shack Color Computer. It was initially envisioned as a terminal, which was built, and shortly there after they replaced the terminal software with Microsoft Basic, and voila, late 70s / Early 80s general purpose "home" computer. With this terminal, I like how easy HP made it to hack the machine... lol.

@galier2 6 лет назад

The 8008 (and TI TMS-1795) had been specifically built for a terminal (Datapoint 2200). So it was terminals that pushed for µ-processors not the other way round (i.e. µ-processors conquering terminals as a side effect of micro-computers).

@shmehfleh3115 6 лет назад

Heck, the i8080 was in the original Space Invaders arcade machine!

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

Yes indeed! One of the first Arcade game (or is it THE first?) to use a microprocessor.

@colindhowell 4 года назад

@@CuriousMarc No, not the first, but a direct descendant of the first. The first was Midway's Gun Fight in 1975, which also used an 8080A. That was a two-player Old West shootout. (Some people may remember Boot Hill, a very similar Midway game from 1977 which was a bit more sophisticated and let you play against the computer.) The basic architecture of the Gun Fight machine was used for a number of games from Midway over the next few years, such as Boot Hill and the submarine shooting-gallery game Sea Wolf. This architecture was also borrowed by Taito, which Midway had a relationship with. (Gun Fight itself had been a microprocessor port of a Taito game that had used discrete logic). In 1978 Taito used the Gun Fight-type board for their game Space Invaders. Japan went nuts over Space Invaders, and a legend was born. It's funny that the CPU of your terminal is actually a bit faster than that of the original Space Invaders hardware. (The terminal has a 2.5 MHz 8080A-2, vs. Space Invaders' 2 MHz 8080A.) Though Space Invaders has a special video shifter circuit to speed up its bitmapped graphics, as well as special sound generator circuits.

@lawrencedoliveiro9104 6 лет назад

Have you thought of trying to figure out how the programs work, and what the ROM calls do?

@Madness832 6 лет назад

In "Keep on Driving," what do the triple-x's represent, broads or booze? :D

@hotplatelabs 6 лет назад

I’d love to see a CP/M port!

@Membrane556 6 лет назад

The 2645A doesn't have enough memory to run CP/M but the 2647A does.

@arthur2305 6 лет назад

8:39 This computer reminds me of the Compaq Portable 486c!

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

It's a DolchPAC 65. See my other videos about it. Pentium based.

@markevans2294 Год назад

The first couple of bytes of the file are 040 in octal, which the 8080 treats as a NOP. The 8080 processor has incomplete instruction decoding with Intel only documenting the lowest opcode. Zilog and Intel used these undocumented opcodes to extend the functionality of the Z80 and 8085 respectively. The third byte is 177 which corresponds to MOV A,A These may make more sense as their binary values of 00100000 and 01111111 possibly as a font/bitmap definition. Disassembling from the execution address would be mroe useful. Though it's possible that the split between data and code comes before that. These might have been written in a high-level language and cross-compiled.

@colinstu 6 лет назад

How big are the games? how many could you fit on a tape?

@spatulasnout 4 года назад

The Space Invaders disassembly shown at 6:45 ranges from 0xEFD8 to 0xF92F, so: 2391 bytes.

@adam7868 6 лет назад

must have been a great day at the office

@noland65 6 лет назад

A video very much to my taste! Are there any dates associated to the games (credits or else)?

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

Unfortunately, no dates I could see. The three last programs show the programmers name on the screen.

@noland65 6 лет назад

Thanks, anyway!

@StanSieler 3 года назад

Most of the games I've seen on the HP2645A were written prior to mid 1979, when I started at HP and first saw them.

@humidbeing 6 лет назад

Hi Marc. Love your videos. I don't suppose you have a github account where you publish code?

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

No, but I am working on a companion website that would have the docs and files and more in-depth info about the items in the videos.

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

I added links to the original files I found on the net in the video description.

@gotj 6 лет назад

Where did you get the games? I want one of these hp :-)

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

I added the sources in the video description. Hard to find.

@afloyd4976 6 лет назад

Just needs a port of Tetris and Solitaire.

@brendangreen5621 6 лет назад

8.05 what was that command?, love your videos btw

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

You mean 8:34? stty -F /dev/ttyS0 2400 (set the COM1 port speed to 2400 bauds) cat game.txt > /dev/ttyS0 (send the file over the serial port)

@maicod 6 лет назад

dad left his marks in the code ;-)

@OneSwitch 6 лет назад

Do you have any dates for the games? I wonder if they're mostly from the early 80s. Curious if any are earlier.

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

My guess would be before, even early seventies, since some of them are available as 8008 code for the original HP 2640 (invaders, pong). But I don't know, no dates in the code.

@OneSwitch 6 лет назад

Wonder if there's no date in the code, as you'd normally date and put your name as a credit.... perhaps they didn't want to be found out for skiving off the work they were supposed to be doing. :) Was thinking some of the games would be later as Space Invaders clones I'd guess would be 1978 (more likely 79) onwards... Pac-Man clones 1980 onwards. Was curious about that one-button plane shooting game as I'm writing a book on them. Don't suppose you would be willing to share a link to the code. Just curious to take a peek. No worries if not.

@colindhowell 4 года назад

@@CuriousMarc The Pong might be older, but Invaders can't predate the 1978 original-such close resemblance by pure chance defies belief. HP kept making the 8008-based 2640B until 1981, so porting a game to it after 1978 is not inconceivable.

@GORF_EMPIRE 2 года назад

No surprise that you can run 'Space Invaders' which uses an 8080.

@RonJohn63 6 лет назад

9:21 The pv command would show a progress bar.

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

I had to look that one up (I'm no Linux expert...). Great suggestion!

@douro20 6 лет назад

They apparently ported TinyBASIC to it.

@edgeeffect 5 лет назад

Are there enough clues in the games for you to write a program of your own?

@andiarrohnds5163 4 года назад

best computar

@LiviuDragon 2 года назад

Is this computer termina suposed to have a hard drive or pshysical memory

@AmauryJacquot 6 лет назад

how about runing a basic on that thing ?

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

Coming up. The 2645 is a bit short of ROM and RAM to support it, but the 2647F runs Bill Gates very own BASIC.

@leisergeist 6 лет назад

I wonder how many workers got caught playing pong on the company's most expensive hardware during work hours lol

@kooky216 6 лет назад

Noob question: There's no operating system, right? Back in the day the terminal wouldn't actually do anything unless it was connected to a mainframe or something?

@525Lines 6 лет назад

It has to have some operating system. Even a digital calculator has an operating system.

@RonJohn63 6 лет назад

_Even a digital calculator has an operating system._ No. The single program runs directly on the metal. (EDIT: of course, a simple four-function calculator is substantially different from a programmable calculator, so we're both right within specific domains of digital calculators.)

@RonJohn63 6 лет назад

+Kooky, you're right, for *dumb* terminals. But this is a smart terminal with a "monitor" (very simple, limited functionality OS not meant for end users) in ROM that handles the tape drives.

@lescitrons 6 лет назад

It isn't an operating system because it doesn't provide common services for programs, and it doesn't manage and allocate resources.

@RonJohn63 6 лет назад

_it doesn't provide common services for programs_ Modern calculators (heck, even many HP & TI calculators from 40 years ago) are programmable, and so need some simple OS. Ones with USB data cables and/or SD cards _definitely_ have simple (let me emphasize: simple) OSs.

@Lethaltail 5 лет назад

Engineers could've called Hac-Man Pac-Ard; Pac's right in their company's name!

@biukucanoe 5 лет назад

Must be after i was there 1978. Now apple space ship site cupertino

@lawrencedoliveiro9104 6 лет назад

1:21 Kenbak was before that. And before that was the LINC -- the first machine cheap enough for its purchase to be OK’d by a head of department.

@lawrencedoliveiro9104 6 лет назад

There is a video somewhere where the engineer behind the Linc points out how it counts as the “first” PC. Pricing was an important part of that. Sure, the Kenbak never did well, But now we are going past “first” and into “first ... that ...”.

@StanSieler 3 года назад

"backdoor" ...no, HP documented the development process and sold documentation on how to develop for the HP2645A. BTW, the firmware for the HP2645A is at bitsavers.org.

@CuriousMarc 3 года назад

They did, with the introduction of the HP 2649 variant in 1977. At which point the internal development backdoor became documented. The 2649 was supposed to be an application specific version of the terminal, allowing you to modify the terminal software by writing new ROMs. They apparently even released the ROM code of the HP 2648 which included the graphics - although I have not found a copy of it. I'm not sure how successful that was, as it is awfully difficult to develop on the 8080-based system as an HP outsider, since it originally necessitated an HP 1000 computer environment with a cross-compiler, and special writeable control store boards in the terminal to test and debug the machine code. The main use of the 2649 I could find was within HP itself, for the HP 3000 system consoles. There was a Racal Redac full PCB CAD system developed on the 2648 or 2647 also.

@StanSieler 3 года назад

@@CuriousMarc Not sure of the dates, but the "System 2000" word processor, from AICS (in Albuquerque, New Mexico), was selling a re-programmed 2645 at least in 1983. (It was a full-blown word processor, and could print output on an attached printer (e.g., IIRC, a daisy-wheel). AICS also developed the first (IIRC) speech synthesis board (for the Altair 8080 in 1975).

@StanSieler 3 года назад

And, you're right...AICS was asked by HP to develop for the 2649 in 1976: "In that same year, 1976, HP approached us and asked if we would like to convert their new HP2649 OEM-modifiable intelligent terminal into a PC. We declined on the basis that that the machine seemed far too expensive for the super-hobbyist market that predominated at the time. However, based on the suggestion of Jay Cunningham, an associate of the time, we did agree to convert it into a standalone word processor for professional office use. And the HP2649 proved to be ideal for that use." (The "asked us to convert" was HP's response to the Apple II success...they asked AICS if the 264x could compete against the Apple II. Wirt (of AICS) said: no, too expensive.)

@cygil1 2 года назад

@@StanSieler This account makes little sense. Converting a terminal into a standalone word processor is already doing 90% of the work necessary for a general purpose PC, why not just go the extra mile?

@AlainHubert 6 лет назад

"Allows you" is pronounced "alaouze iou" not "alloze iou" (french phonetics). Just to help your spoken english a little. Otherwise I do enjoy your videos very much. Merci Marc. ;-)

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

Oh, zis eez how you sai eet. Been trying to get rid of my accent for 20 years and have not succeeded. Drives my daughters crazy.

@AlainHubert 6 лет назад

lol ! I agree with ungratefulmetalpansy, it doesn't really matter...

@DanielPalmans 3 года назад

@@CuriousMarc Same for me, I moved from Belgium to San Jose, CA in 1987, but cant'loose the accent :-)

@eddievhfan1984 6 лет назад

OMG, *so* many NOP slides...

@mechadrake 6 лет назад

die aliens die?! demonetized by youtube for xenophoby! ;) that is the world we live now.

@pcuser80 6 лет назад

Z80 Assembly is easier to read than 8080 mnemonics.

@leberkassemmel 6 лет назад

arm Assembly is easier to read than x86.

@Coolkeys2009 6 лет назад

+Michi Lo I don't believe ARM is directly derived from the 8080 and Z80.

@leberkassemmel 6 лет назад

+Coolkeys2009 Nope. But 8086 binaries could run on any modern PC (As long as the UEFI has a compatability mode). And then stuff like Meltdown and Spectre happens, because nobody fully understands the CPU anymore.

@Coolkeys2009 6 лет назад

+Michi Lo The software in this video is not running on PC compatible hardware and will not run on a PC. The original commenter was making a relevant point that it may be more convenient to use a Z80 disassembler to view 8080 code.

@Membrane556 6 лет назад

Arm was inspired by the 6502.

@Lethaltail 6 лет назад

2nd!

@Lethaltail 6 лет назад

360p, too!

@CuriousMarc 6 лет назад

If you are early, you get to see it in potato vision, before the HD version is processed ;-)