Trsvid, a video player for TRS-80 Model 1, 3 and 4 | Hacker News Reader

Trsvid, a video player for TRS-80 Model 1, 3 and 4

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91 pointstodsacerdoti14 comments

Wow. I still remember the first time I played a Mode 1 game that had ‘sound’. I think t was called Space Trek or Graphic Trek and was a Star Trek style space game.

Fire phasers and the thing made sound. Mind blown.

The thing to remember is the Model 1 had zero sound designed in the thing.

This game made sound by RAPIDLY turning on/off the relay that controlled the tape deck. The Relay!!!

Soon thereafter the standard practice was to unplug the tape deck and hookup the speaker and the thing made sound using the same equipment that made the audio to record the programs on the tape drive. I now know if that hadn’t happened we’d have all burned out the relays in the thing…

Wild times.

I used to hear what my Model 1 was up to by putting a little transistor radio next to it and tuning it until I could hear the screeching RF noise it put out. It would give me a sense of whether my code was still running, stuck in a loop, how tight the loop was, etc.

My stepfather hated the fact that whenever I was working on it, he couldn't get clear radio reception for his classical music listening.

Very impressive.

The modern emulated hard drive helps for storing the video. The floppies are limited to hundreds of KB, and there was even less RAM. Though, IIRC, around the time the III or 4P were being sold, Radio Shack offered 5MB and 10MB hard drives, in a big external chassis that looked like "https://www.ebay.com/itm/125873516461", but I don't know how fast that could be used to stream frames/updates to RAM. Does the modern hard drive emulator remove a bottleneck?

> The floppies are limited to hundreds of KB

Or less, if you had the original Tandy drive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Floppy_disk_drives: Floppy disk operation requires buying the Expansion Interface, which included a single-density floppy disk interface (with a formatted capacity of 85K)

The article doesn't address the obvious question: why skip the Model II?

The Model 3 & 4 were evolutions from the Model 1. The Model 2 was targeted at a higher end business market and about the only thing it had in common with the 1, 3 & 4 was the use of a Z80 processor. The upgrade path from the Model 2 would have been the Model 12, 16, 16B & 6000. The Model 16 added a 68000 processor and software could run on either the Z80 or the 68000. Tandy offered their own TRSDOS or Xenix for the Model 16. CP/M was available from 3rd parties. For a while in the early 80s the Model 16B running Xenix was the best selling unix system.

This TRS-80 program blew people away in 1979

http://www.dnull.com/demon/

It did indeed!

Also, Voyage of the Valkyrie... That was a hell of a game, and wasted many, many hours of my life.

To me, I thought the interesting part was how he had to modify the hard drive emulator firmware to remove CPU wait states and support a streaming mode - I would have thought even the slowest SD card would be enough to overwhelm any 8 bit computer (I didn't even know SD cards had a special rarely used streaming mode).

What really gets me is the music. It feels so alien to hear real sampled music on these devices.

Incredible. I still remember 13 ghosts being the most intense game I'd seen on TRS-80. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQDqYZ2pgOs

Who knew the good ol' Trash 80 could do stuff like this! We had one for a while but I was never able to do anything interesting with it, I was super young though.

Very impressive! You would make millions if this was 1980!

Really good !

I understand the notes about playing sound. Audio filtering is definitely a hard problem (learned the hard way too :-) )

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