Announcing early field test of new HCS II SC ROM

[wmaton]

Greetings fellow HCS II users.

It's been a very long while and I wanted to post this in time for Christmas to give everyone a view of what's been cooking.

- The hcs.sourceforge.net CVS repository was nuked to start from scratch.
As Ed Nisley once said, "reset registers"! No one was downloading from
it anyways and it was a good thing too: There was no matching ROM.

- HCS II ROM sources are now merged. Version 4.20 includes all features
found in the version 3.6x and version 4.x, regardless of which speed
processor you are using. No more parallel versions. Version selection
is done at compile time, so there are two ROMs, each for different speeds.
Testing and feedback of this ROM release is appreciated.

- Host and compile are synced up to release 4.20.

- The HCS II XPRESS compiler compiles cleanly under Linux, FreeBSD and MS-DOS.

- Stat-link. The state of this feature is unchanged since 2001. In other
words, it's unknown if it works in the ROM. How keen are people to see
this function completely? Host does not support this yet, but the XPRESS
compiler does.

- Thanks to a generous benefactor, the BCC180 (IND180 in XPRESS parlance)
has been confirmed to work using version 3.x and version 4.20 ROMs. However,
I have a limited number of BCC expansion boards, so not all boards can
be tested. I don't have the SpectraSense 2000, so I cannot confirm ROM
support in that, except to say that the ROM makes mention of it everywhere.
If someone has that and is willing to test it and provide feedback, that
would be great.

- The HCS II XPRESS manual will be updated to reflect the changes, and
saved as both PDF and HTML. The sources will still be in PageMaker format
because it's just simpler to update it that way than to transfer to MS
Word and fight with it to restore the formatting.

- As with any Open Source effort, I make no claims that I can support this
in the way a commericial entity can. The community is there for you.

Given all of that, have a look at: http://www.wfms.org/hcs/release/.

And don't just thank me, thank Steve Ciarcia and the others too.

[ncherry]

Cool! Are you going to post everything to the Sourceforge site? All the other code is there and I really need to clean up everything so it can be found.

I have a Spectra 2000, a BC180 (I think), and the HCS2DX. So I'll test what I can.

[wmaton]

Not at this point. I'm still getting things organized, and contrary to what folks believe, I've only scratched the tip of the iceberg. I intend to clean-up and synchronize the rest of what we have and post that to.

[Steve]

The irony of all this, William, is that if you were around doing all this stuff last year then I probably wouldn't have changed my home control system. Of course, I also realize it is a chicken and egg situation. My changing systems gave you all the boards and equipment that now allows you to experiement and make things work. I just wish I had the time to have done it along with you.

I wish you luck on the continuing evolution of HCSII. Let me know if I can help.

--Steve