TRS-80 Emulator in Go | Hacker News Reader

TRS-80 Emulator in Go

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Ha! Level 1 Basic? With just two strings A$ and B$ ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#BASIC

I remember having to pay $300 for the Level 2 upgrade, just a rom change.

Had to save everything to audio cassette three times just in case they went bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Cassette_tape_drive

Then fortunately the IBM PC came out with a whopping 160KB single sided 5.25" floppy disk.

I believe level 1 is the key to the claim at the end that the M3 had no graphics mode. The M3 had blocky character based graphics (non-ASCII) as seen at:

http://www.classiccmp.org/cpmarchives/trs80/mirrors/www.disc...

Look for example at trsdos 1.3 on a model 3, I saw that screen a lot in the early 80s. Much like the emulator author, my first computer was also a model 3. Fun times.

Later moved on to the coco and OS/9 and its K+R C compiler and all that. After using OS/9 for years, downgrading to msdos for about a decade was quite a bummer, till I upgraded to linux.

(And edited to add, noobs don't understand that software always declines to $0. Dev environments used to always be $250 or even the Borland/Turbo series were $99. So $300 for basic isn't unrealistic. Text editors used to be expensive. Well, this is specialized and complicated software that only specialists use and they need lots of expensive support, insert all the arguments you hear today about CAD or office software. Then growing up in the 80s and paying $99 to fool around with Turbo Pascal or Turbo Prolog and then in the early 90s being able to install better stuff for free with linux? Wow. Office software is already free, and soon CAD and everything else will join it. Good luck selling expensive software, you can't do that for long, it all eventually drops to zero.)

Yeah graphics were blocks. But blocks inspired me to figure out how write breakout on the TRS-80 and get it to move fast enough for realtime by optimizations.

Unfortunately I didn't even have a cassette recorder to start with so I just memorized the code and would start from scratch each time and try to write it better than before.

My emulator does Level 3. The difference is the language itself. The graphics were the same for both (blocky, as you say).

Level 2 Upgrade was also the 16K RAM, IIRC. Which I might not, but I know I got both the ROM and RAM upgrade at the same time, and if it'd been more than $300 I think my parents would have sold ME.

The Model I was the first computer I ever saw in real life... I remember being in awe of the thing, so my parents bought me a Timex Sinclair 1000 (ZX81)... a bit of a difference but...

Parents got me a TRS-80 Model I, 4K RAM, 4K ROM BASIC. Going to the 16K RAM and 16K ROM Microsoft BASIC a little later felt like getting all the power in the world.

Same for me with the Model I, but my parents then got me a Model III. I didn't appreciate at the time how freakishly expensive it was.

Oh, someone mentioning a Timex!

My first computer was a Timex Sinclar 2068.

Still kept in its original box at my parents place.

My first "professional" coding was on a TRS-80 as a spotty 13/14 year old. My Uncle had one that ran pricing software for his double glazing business. I spent my summer holidays debugging their BASIC application.

When he upgraded he eventually gave me the thing.

My elementary school had several TRS-80s and very little clue what to do with them. The only lesson I can remember involved creating a picture on graph paper and then typing PSET over and over again to color each pixel to match your paper.

I think the lasting lesson most students took from it is that computers are insanely tedious and boring. Which isn't exactly false, but also not the whole story.

I asked the teacher how to make loops and she showed me an example in her book, which was enough for me to figure them out and cut my typing down by about 100x. I guess they assumed it would be too hard to even bother mentioning.

Color? That'd be the TRS-80 Color Computer, very different from the TRS-80 Model III, which was a (slightly) improved version of the TRS-80 Model I. Different CPU (6809E) in the CoCo, most of the TRS-80s used Z-80s till you got to the Unix machine, which used a 68000.

Didn't appreciate the CoCo at the time, but a neat machine in retrospect.

I didn't mean to imply there was more than one. Just on or off.

But does it boot LDOS? Alas, there are few references not on the web to LDOS, which I always felt was so much better than CP/M or MS-DOS

http://www.tim-mann.org/ldos.html

It does! I loved LDOS and DOS-PLUS.

In fact it comes with an LDOS disk. Try putting "ldos513.dsk" into Drive 0 and booting.

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