Revisit TRS-80 emulation (sdltrs) Pt 2/2

First things first. In some of the examples below WordPress has changed my simple double quotes to fancy double quotes. Even though I define the block as code. So you can’t simply copy&paste as I intended.

I’m purposefully being wordy because my previous notes were too sparse. With my notes it’s taken me a day and a half to get to where I was 2.5 years ago. So far I’ve successfully loaded and ran Super Nova. Here is more info on it. Similarly I know I ran Dancing Demon in the past, and today I would have assumed I loaded it from tape. Since that is how I ran it on my real TRS-80. Thankfully I made a video in which you can clearly see I ran it from a floppy on TRSDOS. But no success running Startrek which has a .bas extension the asterisk doesn’t flash when I try and load it.. I now know I can’t just load/run a .bas file. This is why I should have documented better before. I was using the CLOAD command. For one thing these .bas files are listed on Linux as binary. I’m sure in the past I would load then could LIST them also. If you try and list it anyway on the host OS you can see basic code mixed with gibberish. There are too many files like that to say it was corrupted. At any rate I found some small .bas files that were text and they didn’t load either. And the lines did end in CRLF…so that wasn’t the problem! I also tried entering the commands in upper case. If I go to CASSETTE MANAGEMENT from F7 the cassette position has moved, I’ve also seen the position at the end.

However Super Nova IS binary and you use SYSTEM and not CLOAD. But still…it loads.

Perhaps it’s a bug. This says Its cassette management seems hopelessly bugged. However it worked for me in the past.

No…not a bug!

I created a Blank cassette from Cassette Management. Then wrote very small program. Then did a CSAVE…which failed. I needed to CSAVE with a 1 letter file name in quotes (which I learned from one of my old TRS-80 manuals) and…that worked! And of course it saved it on the cassette Not as 1 letter .bas file. And Level II basic never could save with long filenames anyway.

I may be backing my way into a solution. So now I’m guessing that these .bas files are probably for the TRSDOS OS. Then again maybe not because TRSDOS uses floppies. I didn’t document and I don’t remember.

Anywho my previous instructions were a help…but cut and pasting the sdltrs command (I found in earlier instructions) didn’t work to boot TRSDOS because the double quotes were changed to something that resembled ASCII double quotes…but weren’t. Fixed that then realized I had changed the location of the TRSDOS directory. So I finally got TRSDOS working…

By typing…
sdltrs -keystretch 400 -scale2 -autodelay -model1 -disk0 “/home/bill/Downloads/Computers/TRS-80 emulator/TRS-80/TRSDOS_v2.3_(1979)(Radio_Shack)[DSK][Master]/disk1-0” -romfile ~/xtrs/ROMS/level2.rom -diskdir .

OK…I got it!

I found a local linux directory that contained…
sst2.DSK and sst3.DSK
SST for Super Star Trek!

So back to TRSDOS…

did a directory of Disk1…
DIR :1
This showed some files like…

FILE DIRECTORY — DRIVE 1 TRSDOS — 01/29/80

SUPSTRKG P SUPSTU1C/BAS SUPSTU1A/BAS SUPSTU1B/BAS

DOS READY

Now the 3 files that end in /BAS matched the contents of a zip file “Super_Star_Trek_(19xx)(Author_Unknown_2)[BAS].zip” I got from this website. Except the extension for them was .bas

Anywho I guess I somehow transfered those local linux files to a TRSDOS floppy. I’ll look into that at a later date.

OK that later date is now, I had made a comment in a previous post that said…
There is an IMPORT/CMD in trsdos. This allowed me to import Linux files into the emulator. Like so “IMPORT -L file.bas” this imported the file to “FILE/BAS”.

However obviously that command couldn’t be a TRSDOS command unless it could look decades into the future and see the need to import files from a host. Long story short. The emulator has a folder called diskimages that contains the file utility.dsk. This link describes IMPORT and other commands. http://pwet.fr/man/linux/commandes/xtrs/ Which at this point I assume probably contains IMPORT/CMD.

So I used Floppy Disk Management from sdltrs Main Menu (F7) and I pointed Disk1 (because Disk0 contained the OS) to sst2.DSK…that I mentioned above I wasn’t sure that this would work because apparently I had to reference the OS using a link to disk1-0 as can be seen in the sdltrs startup command. But it worked.

To continue I typed…

  • BASIC from TRSDOS to enter disk Basic
  • LOAD “SUPSTU1B/BAS” …I chose that file because I had put a readme in the unzipped directory that said “supstu1a.bas” doesn’t work
  • Found another readme where I said…
    • SSTn.DSK [Super Star Trek]
      • LOAD”SUPSTDA1/BAS:n” [where :n is 0-3 drive] on sst3.DSK is probably the best
  • So…LOAD “SUPSTU1B/BAS:1”
  • TRSDOS responded…READY
  • At that point I was able to type LIST and see Basic code
  • Finally…RUN
  • where upon…i saw…

Note: You can press F10 from disk BASIC to return to TRSDOS

Thanks for the memories…mom and dad!