There's a new version (1.5a) of the My Series III classic 3000 simulator setup. It's currently 
available at the following Google Drive link:


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vKqISTtZYjQyRsJ5a4vf5w9b9nqKNLpg


This version includes new bundled hardware simulations of the original HP 2654A
terminal and the HP 2641A APL Display Station, allowing you to experience the full
glory of APL\3000 with the APL character set as it was originally intended. Details
are in the README.txt file.


And if you want the real Series III experience, you can use one of these terminal
emulators and set the baud rate to 2400 baud, the fastest that you could talk to
a Series III. By default, they run at 9600 baud which is cheating a little as the ATC 
ports could not go this fast in reality. Still feels like the 1980s though.


In addition, there's TREK73.PUB.GAMES, a working PCLINK2 for Reflection transfers,
JOBINFO.PRIV.INTX3 is installed into SL.PUB.SYS, and for use with the new HP 2645A
terminal simulation, you can find the old downloadable games for it in HP2645.GAMES.


Since getting APL\3000 working, I had been on a quest to find a way to run it in full APL
terminal mode with all the cool characters, overstrikes, etc. I looked at possibly enhancing
QCTerm to do it, or hacking up Putty, but a breakthrough came when I found out that
F. Ulivi had written an HP2645 driver for the MAME emulator. The HP 2641A is basically
a '45 with different firmware, so the hope was that just loading the '41 firmware into the
'45 emulator would magically give us a virtual HP 2641A terminal. A purported set of 
dumps of the ROMs from a '41 was available on Bitsavers, but it turned out that one of
the boards used was not actually from a '41, so that was a dead-end, although it did
have one of the ROMs we needed as well as the APL Character Set ROMs.


I then put out a call on an old HP computer collector's forum for anyone who might have
a lead on a real HP 2641A or any parts from it. Wonder of wonders, Kyle Owen responded
that he had a '41 and could dump the ROMs for us! After that, it was a simple matter 
to make a derivative of the hp2645 MAME code that accounted for the few differences
in the 2641 and the new character sets and ROM images, and somewhat amazingly
it all works and you can have your very-own virtual APL terminal running the original
HP firmware and you can connect it to the simulated HP 3000 and run APL and 
everything works. Time to party like it's 1976!


Again, the details of using it are in the README.txt file that comes in the  My Series III 1.5a.zip.


Enjoy!


Gavin

On August 28, 2020 at 8:29 PM, Gavin Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


Hi all,


Since Roy "announced" my little hobby project here (thank you Roy) I guess I can post a link here as well for people who want to play with it, with the caveat that there is no official license of any sort that I know of covering this 40-year-old HP software that has been floating around, so keep that in mind.


For the last month or so I have been constructing a fully-appointed virtual Series III computer, using David Bryan's amazing Classic 1970s HP-3000 simulator/emulator along with the existing MPE V/R software that has been floating around with it, and the old CSL tapes collected by Kevin Miller and others. Most of this was available, but there was "some assembly required" to put it together into something usable. My goal was to produce a TurnKey version with exactly what you need that runs right out of the box. 


Along the way, I ended up hacking the simulator to make a Series III that supported 4x as much memory as any real one ever did, and reverse-engineered the APL microcode functionality in order to add emulation of those instructions to MPE so that APL\3000 could run again for the first time in 35 years or so.


So, here is a (probably temporary so get it while you can) link to the new 1.4 version of "My Series III" for all your retro-MPE needs.


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gfUpk3R4OcuqReWXbKXnFwtJ62JDX16y


All the instructions you need are in the associated README.txt file, and it takes only a minute or so to be up and running with MPE. You can optionally use Reflection (if you have it) or QCTerm (links to the free archived version and instructions in the README) to get full terminal functionality and run up to 15 user sessions via telnet to the virtual ATC ports on the Series III.


This version includes fully working APL\3000 and my associated APL CPU Instruction Set emulation, as well as being a new model of HP-3000, which one might call a Series III+ (or even a Series IV) which has its memory "hardware" support increased to 8MB (4096K words) which is the same maximum amount of memory that MPE IV supported on the Series 64 in those days.


One extra file is included with this version which is a PDF of the 1976 APL\3000 Reference Manual since that has been so hard to find.


One tip for playing with APL: Turn your CAPS LOCK on first.


It also contains several metric crap-tons of old freeware including a complete GAMES account with all of the historically relevant software like Advent, Mansion, Dungeon, Warp, Trek73, DROID, and even the DRAGONS game written by a college kid who then used it to get a job at TSR where he contributed to the writing in many of their D&D products and later went on to be the lead designer for a little game called Skyrim. 



This is a five-disc system (you can add up to three more if you need more space, though there's about a million free sectors right now) with the directory expanded to 6,000 sectors  and various system tables expanded so you should not encounter any issues with it. It has been perfectly stable, staying up for weeks and pretty much never crashing or having any issue whatsoever. 


Hopefully one or two of you will have some fun with it.


Feedback is appreciated.


Gavin

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