I ordered a new battery for HERO, and installed it tonight. (this is after removing the broken arm and fixing the torso drive (sort of)). He works! I got an old 286 laptop (that's 80286 CPU, as in 1980s vintage 16 bit) out of the basement and got the terminal program running in Windows 3.0, and found the right serial cable, and we have communications. The speech synthesizer is really neat on these old robots....take a look...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsh-g4Qond0