
TRS-80 Emulator in Go - harel
http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/projects/trs80_emulator/
======
ck2
Ha! Level 1 Basic? With just two strings A$ and B$ ?

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

~~~
VLM
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...](http://www.classiccmp.org/cpmarchives/trs80/mirrors/www.discover-
net.net/~dmkeil/software/trs-DOS.htm)

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.)

~~~
ck2
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.

------
empressplay
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...

~~~
pkroll
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.

------
telecoda
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.

------
ef4
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.

~~~
pkroll
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.

~~~
ef4
I didn't mean to imply there was more than one. Just on or off.

------
leejoramo
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](http://www.tim-mann.org/ldos.html)

~~~
lkesteloot
It does! I loved LDOS and DOS-PLUS.

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

