Alcor/Tandy Pascal 2 on Tandy TRS-80 Model 4 (as in TRS80GP)

[Richard Deane]

Hi,

To broaden my retro knowledge from CP/M to a system I never had - TRS-80, I thought it would be good to try Alcor Pascal on TRS-80 Model 4. Sadly I can't get it to work.

I am using LS-DOS 6.31 under TRS90GP on Windows  & SDLTRS on Linux. That was to rule out my problems being related to the emulator.

I have downloaded numerous Alcor Pascal DSK & DMK images from various archive sites and all fail. I cant believe that they are all corrupt in some way. Sometimes the Pascalb/cmd will crash, but with  other disks it seems to work, but then runp or loadgen will fail.

I know that there are some TRS-80 fans in this group so I am hoping someone actually knows how to get the Pascal working and can give me a copy of the boot disk and pascal disk so I have a good permutation. 

I wondered whether LS-DOS 6.31 was too new,  so I shall try an older version of TRSDOS (LDOS?). I have moved from novice to low intermediate :)  I can boot and have hard disk as :0, and know how to corrupt a disk with RESET or BACKUP :)

As an aside, if I ask Copilot or ChatGPT for information they invent facts and give me cheat sheets for Blaise II or Ted editors with very Wordstar like commands. Annoying.

Cheers

Richard

(my actual back in the day CP/M experience was on an Ithaca Intersystems S100 system with CP/M 2.2.Hard Disk and removable 10MB (?) disk packs. I designed the system to develop a project management suite, moving from PLI on IBM Mainframe to Pascal on CP/M to avoid huge mainframe datacentre time-sharing costs. (North Sea Oil Rig project management)  I used Pascal as PLI-80 wasn't  yet available and burnt my way through numerous Pascal compilers until I found Transam TCL Pascal which took whatever I threw at it. Sadly I can't find a copy now. Magic Wand was my programming editor. I used Micro-Integration Bisync  products to connect through to the mainframe using Synchronous Serial IO. I think it had an ADM3a terminal. Sadly I can't find those Micro Integration products now either, otherwise I could connect to my Hercules (IBM Mainframe ) emulator.)