Trs-80 Emulator

[Fe Kittner]

Thereare many TRS-80 emulators out there for various operating systems. The top few on this list are excellent and any of them will provide you with an accurate emulation experience. Like every product out there, however, not every emulator emulates everything, and there are some features present in one which are not present in the other. This may mean you need to use different emulators depending on whether you wish to use features which only one supports.

The emulator runs on Windows from XP all the way up to Windows 10. Included in the download are versions for MacOS, Linux and Raspberry Pi. They may not be at full feature parity with the Windows version but the emulator runs just fine under Wine. It should run well on any machine produced in the past decade.

SDLTRS builds on XTRS and adds Windows and Mac OS X support, Fullscreen display, Text based GUI on Windows and Linux, and in Fullscreen mode on the Macintosh, Configuration files, Disk LED Indicators on screen, Creation of Disk images inside of the program, Saving and loading of disk sets, Saving and loading of emulator state, Copy and Paste of text to/from host and emulator, and USB Joystick support.

I hope I find help. My second computer after the Sinclair ZX81 was a TRS-80 Model 1. I started there with a flight simulation, where you only had the digital output of the instruments on the screen and a DIN-A4 paper with a printed airfield and coordinates like a map. Did anyone of you know the name of the program, or have a copy of that paper and a picture from the screen, or where I can download this program for an emulator? I use meanwhile MSFS2021 and can fly realistic, but the beginning was on my beloved TRS-80

If you want a few things to try in addition to the UFO game mentioned above, try Battle Trek, or try your hand at word processing (type SCRIPSIT at the prompt). Just be prepared to explore the disks, run a few things, and maybe Google some old user manuals.

Is all this practical? No way. But if you enjoy computer history, this is an easy way to poke around in what would have been a truly extensive software library in its day. Sure, a real TRS-80 would be even more fun. But it would also be a lot more work, not the least of which would be transferring media around.

MalwareBytes blocked me from going to the Big List Of TRS-80 Software, saying it was blocking a Trojan. I was afraid to override the protection. Has anyone else had this problem accessing the willus.com website?

My first major hardware hack I got the nerve to try was piggy backing 1 x 1k static ram chip at add the missing bit to get lowercase. Latter on a got a new character generator chip that allowed lower case without needing to load a driver. It was 1979 and I was in 9th grade.

I have some cassette based programs that I would like to resurrect. Do any of these emulators work well with doing that? I assume I would have to connect a cassette player output to the PC sound card input, correct? Then how would I resave them so I would not have to reload from cassette each time.

There are many versions of Model I Asylum II out there that were ripped from cassette and had their loading addresses changed to work on disk systems. Some of these work on Model IIIs while some suffer the keyboard lockup issues. This may be true also for Asylum, but I dunno. Maybe try to find a different version.

I first wrote a Java program to pick through the audio and try to guess where the pulses were. This worked fine, but whenever the program failed to properly detect a pulse, I had no easy way to visualize how it had failed.

Not for the first time, I remembered that I should default to writing a web app. I rewrote it all in TypeScript and included interactive visualizations, a TRS-80 emulator (to run the decoded program), a Basic decoder, and a disassembler.

One of the fun features is that the selection is synchronized across the various views. You can click on a byte in the hexdump, a keyword in the Basic program, a line in the disassembly, or a pulse in the audio view, and the other views will show the corresponding data. This is useful when the Basic program gets corrupted at some point. You can click the first corrupted keyword to jump to that section of the audio.

The program aggressively tries to decode the correct pulses, filtering out buzzing, making various educated guesses, adapting to changes in volume, and searching around if necessary. I'm pretty happy with it! It's really only failed on audio which isn't even decipherable by a human looking at the audio signal.

I don't have a TRS-80 Model III case to put a Raspberry Pi in, but I have a TRS-80 emulator running the spare otherwise unused RPi 3B+ shown below, but I also want to run the COMPOSITE monitor shown in the image with it, as I need to task the HDMI monitor for other purposes. Does anyone know if the composite screen works by default when the appropriate cable is plugged in? Before I go to the trouble of making special replica badging, and buying the cable, I'd like to know in advance if it'll work.

Thanks, this might do the trick. I had already paid and received the emulator when @retrofan11 posted the message about the guy making money off of another guys work. I'm not knowledgeable "under the floorboards" with Linux/Raspian and am quite unsure how this emulator is even setup. All I know is that it boots directly into the emulator. I am however quite good at following step by step instructions. Anyone willing to run this FREE emulator on a RPi 3 to see if it works in composite, and if so, the steps you took?

If I can get confirmation, I'll buy the Zune cables and always have a "Mini TRS-80" on hand to play with. I'm running out of room in the den, but I can still justify a cute little setup like this, and I'm probably not the only one. ?

I had a chance to today to play with a 4 pole video cable today. Although it was not the correct one, I did get video when the plug was halfway inserted, so I confirmed the composite works as-is. So I've decided to delve a little bit further into the dedicated TRS-80 emulator project.

The composite cables are cheap! So I'll play around with this for a while, but eventually I'll hook it up via HDMI and put the beige TI on the composite side of the larger (shared) monitor

Well, the composite cable arrived... and it didn't work, so I put the dedicated TRS-80 emulator on the monitor with HDMI and have the beige TI using composite. It's not as nice as having the real thing, but it was cheap.

Well, I had to do it. I'm a little dubious though, and I don't know why I get the feeling I paid for a trojan. I also don't know why it should take up to a week to get the email or link though. I'll be sure thoroughly scan the file for safety reasons when I get it. If all goes well, this could be fun.

Best 5 Bux I've spent in quite a while. Turn on the Rpi and you immediately end up in NEWDOS80. In it's pre-configured state it has four drives mounted :1 :2: :3 are loaded with games. So you can be off and running within seconds.

Well, I'm thinking the OS for the RPi to run the emulator and the emulator itself take up most of that space. I have to leave in a short while, so I don't have the time to go back in and investigate anything. I don't think there is anything wrong with sharing the documentation it came with, so if you would like to check it out for yourself, the answer might be in there, I dunno.

I bet you're right. I looked it up and it's a full SD card image, so it's probably reporting 1.8GB, but it either includes a bunch of RPi stuff or just a bunch of blank space in the image. Some images have to have a minimum size as I recall, so it's probably fine.

I finally found a use for my USB gamepad, but I suck using it. Much better on the keyboard (olde skool ya know). But I had fun for an hour playing those old TRS-80 games. Who ever thought an entire TRS-80 computer could be replaced with a credit card sized device and all the software would fit on a chip the size of your thumbnail.

I love my Model 4. With its single case form-factor, it looks just like a vintage computer should. However, ever since acquisition the machine has sat in its box softwareless and lonely. It was simply a case of finding the time to load it with programs. In particular, I wanted to stock it with FLOPPY DOCTOR, hence turning the machine into a 5.25 inch drive-testing beast as described in this article.

I had to get software from Internet-sourced disk images onto real disks. There are a number of ways I could have approached this task. These included RS-232 transfer, using the Semi virtual diskette (SVD), or using an emulator with the capability to write to real disks. I explored the SVD first but found while it seemed to work with most images it was a no-go with protected autoboot programs like FLOPPY DOCTOR. After some research I decided to use David Keil's TRS-80 Model III/IV emulator. This program allowed real disks (including many autoboot protected disks) to be made from disk images.

Using David Keil's emulator presented one problem. It could not make real disks using a Windows XP platform. It needed low-level access to the hardware hence MS-DOS was necessary. I'd faced the same problem in making Kaypro disks and had used my 386-DX40 machine for that task. This needed something faster though.

The solution was a MS-DOS 6.2 Pentium box I had tried (and failed) to sell for $1 on our local auction site. Although it's an ugly beast, I decided to make this my permanent legacy disk-burning machine for both the Model 4 and CP/M micros. I installed a spare 360k floppy drive I had lying around, and loaded the machine up with both the Keil emulator for the Model 4 and Dave Dunfield's CP/M disk-making software. A 3.5 inch drive was used to transfer the necessary disk images from my Internet-capable XP box.

I had plenty of TRS-80 Model 1 software. Although many programs were compatible, there are enough differences between the Model I and Model III/IV for Model 1 programs to have issues. I needed specific Model III versions. Again it was David Keil to the rescue. David's website also contained downloads for most of the software I wanted. I had problems with some of the game images (see later) but this site provided the bulk of my new library.

3a8082e126