Some History

The Romanian company Intreprinderea de Calculatoare Electronice FELIX (The Electronic Computer Factory Felix), also known as ICE Felix (located at Str. G. Constantinescu, 78009 Bucuresti, Romania) was founded in 1970 and became the main IT equipment manufacturer in Romania. They made a series of ZX Spectrum clones as well as other computers, and I’m going to focus today a bit on their Home Computers line, named HC. Unfortunately, after the mid 90s, the factory became technically obsolete and couldn’t keep up with the exponentially growing pace of progress in the IT industry and was soon left rot and sold for scrap or for its lands. There’s a good article in Romanian about the downfall of the company, but I’m sure you can find a decent online translator to get the gist of it.

HC 85, HC 90, HC 91

The HC 90 and HC 91 succeed the HC 85, and are compatible with HC 85 software. They all come in the same black housing. The HC 91 comes with the ability to connect with a daughterboard called ‘IF1’. Due to the amount of ports, it’s one of the best featured Spectrum clones out there.

More about the HC line can be read in Romanian at Wikipedia, and RetroIT (HC85, HC 90, HC91, HC91+).

HC 2000

Released in 1992, it’s a fully compatible upgraded HC 91, with the circuitry of IF1 on the mainboard. It also has a new pretty housing Difference is the new white housing that also holds a 3.5 disk drive, or on some models a cassette player.

There’s more info about it (in Romanian) at RetroIT as well (HC 2000).

HC 386

Based on the case of the HC 2000, the company tried to make a 386 version of the computer, and although a few were completed and sold, they are extremely rare, only a few are known to still exist to the day. Of course, RetroIT has a good article about the HC 386. Unfortunately, by the time this went out the factory’s production line, it was already outdated in terms of performance and was the last computer designed and manufactured in Romania.

My HC 91 Units

I’ve got these two HC units a while ago, three or four years apart, one from a marketplace, the other from a retro group. The units themselves are fairly similar, but what prompted me to get the second one was the fact that they have different types of keyboards. The HC 91 came in two variants, one with 40 keys which was taken from the older models, mostly due to old overstock being repurposed and reused (sustainability, yay!), and because making new moulds would have been expensive. The second one featured 50 keys, adding arrow keys, a wide space bar, as well as some other commanding keys, which was also reused on the HC 91+ and HC 2000.

I was fairly lucky to get both of them featuring the IF1 floppy disk interface, which is fairly rare and brings Floppy Disk connectivity to the HC. This interface is housed in a plastic case identical to the one on the bottom of the computer and is mounted underneath. The connector for making this possible is found at the bottom of the computer. The ‘IF1’ features also network, serial port and joystick and on BASIC level will recognize the microdrive syntax. The system starts up in Sinclair mode, original ROM. A special USR call will make the computer reset and start in CP/M mode. Then a CP/M boot disk is required. CP/M 2.2 (64 char) comes along with the machine. As connectivity it comes with TV output, extension, CGA monitor extension, joystick and cassette player connections.

Unit A — “Charnabon”

To separate better the story of the two computers, I’ve decided to name the 40-key version, “Charnabon” after the first king of the Getae people. This unit is in incredibly good shape, had to travel literally across Bucharest in order to get this and buy it from an old lady and made the transaction in a bus station. I couldn’t test it and it felt really really weird, because while it retains its normal charging socket, it also has a 9V DC in jack added to the side, that’s being delivered by a literal bucket of a power adaptor. I mean look at it! I’ve added an ice cream big tub for scale. The keyboard is pretty beige yellow orange from UV, and some of the keys are off-coloured, sign that they were replaced in time. However, the inside of the computer looks clean and nice, which was actually a nice surprise. The typing experience on the keyboard is extremely bad because of the spring-loaded keys, but also because the “space” character is a button on the right of the bottom row. The RF signal of “Charnabon” seems to be tuned at 380.40Mhz, but I need to tweak it a bit using the fine tuning screw on the RF module.

Unit B — “Burebista”

The second unit, the 50-key version, was nicknamed “Burebista” after the king of the Getae and Dacian tribes that made the first unification of the tribes under the Dacian Kingdom. The computer itself is in a pretty good shape, although it was fairly dusty and has some keys that are off (most of them were slanted or imperfect) and some keycaps have been replaced with blanks. The typing experience on the extended keyboard is fairly better, but the keys are still far away from what could be considered “a typing experience”. The RF signal of “Burebista” seems to be tuned at 201.40Mhz

Running The Machines

When I used the HC 91 for the first time, a bazillion years ago, I would use it mostly for games. We did do some basic (hehe) programming lessons, but we would mostly limit ourselves to drawing circles and lines to create various things. After all, I was only ten years old. Usually, we would connect the HC to the RF receiver of an old TV, as we didn’t have dedicated monitors back then at the “Pupil’s Club” and especially not at home. However, thanks to a great tip I got back in 2019 from Mihai Gaitos / hawk, I found out how to use the DB-9 video connector as a video output that will let me use any TV with a video-complex (composite) input. You need to connect the ground to pin number 2 and the main wire to pin number 7 (video out of the connector). The cable image pictured below is from him. I have made a similar cable, but my test TV (a small cheap 21" Starlight") doesn’t have a composite input.

Playing Some Games

I could write so much about the HC 91 and about the IF 1, but I’d rather just go play with them a bit. As I previously said, my initial use for the HC computers was for games and the BASIC platform excelled at this, with all the computers from that age tapping into an immense library of software and games. After the great success of Pong, computer manufacturers understood that the gaming market is immense, and companies small and big started to create a ton of games and utility software. When I got my Commodore C64, I got it with a huge box of software, games and magazines. You can find more pictures in that article’s gallery. I gave away most of them to some other retro-gaming friends, to be put to better use, but I kept some of the big box games and a couple of tapes. Out of all the ones I kept (pictured), I chose to test only a few titles: Formula 1 Simulator, Space Raiders, Magicland Dizzy, Afterburner, and Horace & The Spiders. To load them into the computer, I chose my solid and pretty Nordmende 3030 walkman. Although I tested everything, it seems that the cables I got from the internet aren’t working, most likely because to the particular pinout on the tape player of the HC which is not compatible with standard Jack-to-DIN5 audio cables. And when dealing with this kind of retro computing, soldering is a very particular skill, one which I unfortunately don’t have. So I had to fall back to using the TZX files in Fuse For Mac OSX, v0.10.0.2, which can also be found in the downloads section. Enjoy some screenshots below!

Fuse For Mac OS X v1.5.6 (PPC/x86)

ZX Spectrum emulator for Mac OS X, Fuse port. Find specs below and download link in the Downloads section at the bottom of the article.

• Accurate 16K, 48K, 128K, +2, +2A and +3 emulation.
• Working +3e, SE, TC2048, TC2068, TS2068, Pentagon 128, Pentagon “512” (Pentagon 128 modified for extra memory), Pentagon 1024 and Scorpion ZS 256 emulation.
• Runs at true Speccy speed on any computer you’re likely to try it on.
• Support for loading from .tzx files, including accelerated loading.
• Sound (on Windows and Mac OS X, and on systems supporting ALSA, the Open Sound System, SDL or OpenBSD/Solaris’s /dev/audio).
• Kempston joystick emulation.
• Emulation of the various printers you could attach to the Spectrum.
• Support for the RZX input recording file format, including ‘competition mode’.
• Emulation of the DivIDE, Interface I, +D, Beta 128, Kempston mouse, Spectrum +3e, ZXATASP and ZXCF interfaces.

winTZX 0.9d 12/2017 by Patrick Delvenne

In order to get access to some files I wanted to test (especially the JECO tapes), I needed a tool to convert the TZX files. The software used to be hosted on the official website at http://www.wintzx.fr but the site no longer exists. Instead the address forwards to https://www.actionresilience.fr (which is down as well). If you’re not familiar with winTZX please see the information below taken from the original website. You can also find a download link in the “Downloads” section at the bottom.

winTZX is a tool to convert ZX Spectrum, ZX 80, ZX 81, CBM64, ATARI ST emulators files into audio files that can be played back on a tape recorder (or floppy disk, or MP3 player) so that you can play your favorites games on your real machine again.
It runs on Windows (XP and 7) and uses the PC’s soundcard. You can read more in the About section.
Supported formats are :
For Spectrum : *.tzx, *.tap, *.mdr, *.tzx.zip, .tap.zip,.bin (emuZwin 48K dump)
For Amstrad : .tzx, .cdt
For CBM64 : .tzx,.t64,.prg,.p00
For ZX81 : *.tzx (block 0x19), *.P, *.P81, *.81
For ZX80 : *.o
For ATARI ST: *.st, *.msa (and direct conversion to/from floppy)

At the end, please check out Mihai’s website, he has a few brilliant articles about this: HC-91, IF-1 and CP/M, Serial communication for HC-91 with IF-1, Snoopy, HC-91 & Robotron. There’s also a really nice guest post by Nicolae Popa, written in Romanian about the JECO collection (Jocuri Educative Jocuri COlective — Educational and Collective Games), a series of Romanian cassette tapes with computer games. There’s also a link towards a Google Drive archive containing all the JECO tapes in TZX format as well as their booklets in PDF, but because I don’t trust Google, I’ve reuploaded it and you can find it in the Downloads section below. All the hard work was done by mister Popa, congratulate him for that.

The guys at z80 Romania also made a huge website with a ton of resources including Software published in Romania, Software developed by Romanian programmers and an extensive and immense Library of Books, Manuals, Magazines and Technical Documentation.

Downloads