Panasonic HHC ROM 'capules'

[MattPilz]

Hi all!

I was really surprised to stumble into this thread and the impressive amount of work members have done in researching this system. I had gotten into the HHC a few years ago but never found much of any info online about it. I'd started plans for an information website on it and began documenting all the ICs, memory map and so on but never finished the idea, yet.

This year I used my HHC full briefcase set to connect to a BBS via a landline and its acoustic modem and last year dabbled into developing software that interfaced with its rare video display (which uses the same chip as an MC-10 and original Tandy Color Computer).

I only have the Microsoft BASIC capsule but have always been interested in the SnapBASIC and SnapFORTH variants. MS BASIC does support POKE/PEEK but relies largely on control / escape characters to do very much with the system itself. Whereas the others were native to the system so you could much more easily interface with I/O devices. Really appreciate the link to the other forum that contained dumps of many capsules, as I had rigged up my own dumping system but had not anything unique to really dump. Now to figure out how to recreate new capsules with things like SnapBASIC and we'll be good to go! Love the 3D model and work on that front too, to create some form of modern EPROM-compatible capsule carrier.

I can't thank Paul Berger enough for sharing those technical documents, I had not seen either of them previously and they are a wealth of information! At one point I had gotten in touch with one of the original engineers of Friends Amis who created a lot of the documentation and software concepts for HHC and he had donated his HHC materials to a museum (which sadly doesn't have any of it digitized). He seemed willing to chat so some day I hope to find time to follow-up or perhaps arrange for the guys at Floppy Days to do an interview with him, since it is all fascinating history to me.

Here's my briefcase HHC online this year:



And here was when I first was interfacing with the display adapter to get colored semi-graphics:



QUESTION: Does anyone have the manual for SnapBASIC? That seems to be lost in time. The SnapFORTH, SnapBASIC and HHC Book have been digitized on archive.org.