This has about driven me crazy in the past week but I’m just now writing about it because I found the solution. To save typing I thought it would be great to use the sdltrs EXPORT utility they provide on their included utility/dsk, to export the TRS-80 Super Star Trek Basic program to Linux to save me from typing it in, as a starting point for me port it to FreeBasic.
One reason I didn’t document was because I’m thinking I must be stupid because in googling I saw no one talked about a problem with the EXPORT or IMPORT command. I guess no one else tried to paste.
Also to minimize typing errors I like to Paste commands into the TRS-80 emulator. I do this all the time in just regular day-to-day work. Especially if a command is long and I need to type it alot. For example load”SUPSTU1A/BAS:1″ because that filename scrambles my brain a little. And if you mistype it, you have to retype the whole command…there is no up arrow command recall! My brain would have no problems with SST/BAS. Anyway pasting has always worked fine in disk Basic (BASIC). However I found pasting doesn’t work in TRSDOS! Actually it kind of works which leads to my almost going crazy trying to figure this out. Also TRSDOS doesn’t like uppercase commands pasted or typed (Caps lock on) in. See actual TRSDOS messages below. Notice TRSDOS fails on the 1st EXPORT because it tells me I’m not using the command correctly. However it does recognize that I’m using the EXPORT command…so it kind of worked. The 2nd EXPORT was completely typed in, and it worked!
EXPORT SUPSTU1A/BAS:1
USAGE: EXPORT [-LNE] FROMFILE [UNIXFILE]
DOS READY
EXPORT SUPSTU1A/BAS:1
DOS READY
Success but…bad news!
The export worked! But it’s in binary…not in ASCII text! So I ended up just painstakingly listing segments of the program and copy/paste to Linux. Still much better than typing the whole program in by hand.