So, I’ve decided to do what I’d been hoping to avoid, and make The Official Digital Antiquarian TRS-80 Emulator the one that’s included in the MESS Project. Its cassette management seems hopelessly bugged, amongst quite a number of other small niggles. Well, SDLTRS isn’t working out for me that well, and you guys apparently aren’t too thrilled with it either. If you should have any problems getting an emulator working, feel free to contact me and I’ll try to help out. (If I learn otherwise, I’ll of course have to take them down.) Included in the zip file are ROMs for both the original BASIC authored by Steve Leininger (“level1.rom”) and the much more usable Microsoft BASIC that Radio Shack released in 1978 (“level2.rom”). I’m going to take the chance that Radio Shack no longer thinks or cares about them and host them here. These are still under copyright to Radio Shack, and not distributed with most emulators. Whatever emulator you end up choosing, you’ll also need the TRS-80 ROMs. David Keil’s emulators, for instance, want to bang the hardware of their host platform directly, and so are subject to some limitations when running on more recent Windows variants that disallow that sort of thing. And there have been a number of other emulators released in years past, but I believe most of these are obsolete now in one way or another. The MESS project also includes an emulated TRS-80 that works very well, but getting that up and running will take a bit more effort. I’ve therefore been using a much more obscure emulator, SDLTRS, which not only runs properly on my Windows machine but also has versions for the Mac and for Linux.

And since it’s a closed-source application, I can’t try to fix it. In addition to being Windows only, however, it also has some problems running under 64-bit Windows 7: it hangs for up to a full minute before displaying file dialogs. It’s certainly the slickest and most polished that I’ve come across. The most popular and publicized emulator as I write this seems to be TRS-32 by Matthew Reed. For anyone whose interest is piqued by any of what will follow, I thought I’d offer some hints on getting your own TRS-80 up and running via emulation. As time permits for the next little while I’m going to be exploring some of the works produced for the TRS-80, the most popular platform of the very early home-computer era.

Trs80 emulator mac