trs80gp – another TRS-80 emulator

Downloaded and trying to learn this program. So these are first impressions. There are a lot of options so I’ll say upfront that things may not initially work because of my unfamiliarity with the program. At start it defaults to Model III.

One thing I wanted to change under view right off the bat was “Sharp Display”. I found “Authentic Display” too blurry. Then I wanted to do was cload a Star Trek cassette, and run it. So I…

Switched to model 1
Inserted the cassette
Typed BASIC (Because it starts in TRSDOS mode)
Typed cload

The asterisks didn’t flash and the program didn’t load.

I then tried the sdltrs emulator booting into Level 2 Basic
Inserted the same cassette
Typed cload and it loaded (asterisks flashed)…and ran!

I haven’t yet figured out how to get trs80gp to just boot into Level 2 Basic without TRSDOS.

I did try booting sdltrs into TRSDOS then switching into Basic and to my surprise it didn’t cload the program either.

I dug a little into the trs80gp website and saw he used a cassette program right from the command line. I tried that and it worked…and loaded extremely fast. Especially if you type “trs80gp sst.cas -turbo“. Something I noticed was the text was lower case.

Important

OK I later found some options that started trs80gp in a more traditional TRS-80 Model 1 mode…
trs80gp -m1 -dx -nlc (Model 1, boot into ROM BASIC [cassette only], No lower case)
When starting like this…cload worked (after inserting sst.cas from the cassette menu)!

As a TRS-80 Model 1 user with only a cassette player, this is more familiar to me. And I would guess the vast majority of early TRS-80 owners had systems like me. Also I think that most systems on display in Radio Shack stores were like this.

Actually the best/fastest way to start the Super Star Trek program from cassette is…
trs80gp sst.cas -m1 -dx -turbo -nlc (-turbo runs it fastest)

Final thoughts…for now!

A very nice and powerful TRS-80 emulator with the ROMs included! My biggest complaint was the program download is binary programs with no checksum provided. I did contact/email the author on July 7th, and he kindly provided a sha256 checksum that matched the download.