Forked version of SDLTRS

I said recently that I would no longer use SDLTRS. However…

Doing further research into reading WAV files in a TRS-80 emulator, I came across this. Which talks about SDL2TRS (The article calls it SDLTRS32 although further down it’s called SDLTRS2) which says it can read WAV files. It’s based on SDLTRS (This is the emulator I used the most in the beginning after starting with xtrs) which according to the article hasn’t changed since 2010. This fork has been updated within the last few months. I installed it by a .deb and it installs as SDL2TRS. It uses the same ROMs I used with SDLTRS.

Note: There is also a regular SDLTRS version, in this fork.

If it can read WAV files, it would eliminate the need for trs80-tools. Although I certainly still would try out trs80-tools. However the more options I have for success…the better.

However I have problems…

The Model 1 cassette startup string I used for the old SDLTRS doesn’t work. 

$ sdltrs -keystretch 400 -scale2 -autodelay -model 1 -romfile ~/xtrs/ROMs/level2.rom -diskdir .
sdltrs ERROR: unrecognized option '-scale2'
sdltrs ERROR: unrecognized option '-autodelay'
$
I looked at the gitlab (not github) issues and saw that a problem with Scale Factor 2x was fixed, so I tried -scale 2 (with a space) and it worked. Also for the TRSDOS startup model1 needed a space, so -model 1.

If I change -model 1 to -model 3 the screen output is garbled (although the Menu is still in English)….

However if I cut & paste these strange looking characters into a text editor, I get…

MEMORY SIZE?
RADIO SHACK LEVEL II BASIC
READY
>_

The old TRSDOS startup string I used works..

Testing trs80-tools

Being a little proactive to learn it’s usage. trs80-tools works on wav files…not mp3 files.

The cassette player I ordered converts cassette to MP3s. I’m assuming I might have to play with the output volume when creating the mp3 file.

First used ffmpeg to convert mp3 to wav.

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 output.wav

You can also use mpg123, however the input must be (unlike ffmpeg) an mp3

mpg123 -w output.wav input.mp3

I renamed output.wav to in.wav for the below tests

$ ./trs80-tool convert in.wav out.cas
Wrote out.cas: CAS file with 0 files
$

That was expected, because my wav file was a converted music mp3 used for a test.

Some more tests (I started only with a good startrek.cas file)…

trs80-tool$ ./trs80-tool convert startrek.cas startrek.wav
Wrote startrek.wav: Basic file in undefined baud WAV file
trs80-tool$ ./trs80-tool convert startrek.wav output.cas
Wrote output.cas: Basic file in low speed CAS file
trs80-tool$ ls -la
total 84632
drwxrwxr-x 3 bill bill 4096 Nov 12 17:50 .
drwxrwxr-x 8 bill bill 4096 Nov 11 13:54 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bill bill 33329230 Nov 12 08:26 in.wav
drwxrwxr-x 2 bill bill 4096 Nov 11 13:54 old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bill bill 13839 Nov 12 17:51 output.cas
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bill bill 13839 Jun 8 2022 startrek.cas
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bill bill 4893422 Nov 12 17:50 startrek.wav
-rwxrwxr-x 1 bill bill 48343233 Nov 11 13:50 trs80-tool
trs80-tool$

Very interesting program. Was looking at some of the other options and saw run (a TRS-80 emulator in the shell). So I tried it…

As you can see the .wav file is 353 times larger than the .cas fil

$ ./trs80-tool run
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                |
|Cass?                                                           |
|Memory Size?                                                    |
|Radio Shack Model III Basic                                     |
|(c) '80 Tandy                                                   |
|READY                                                           |
|>PRINT 5+4                                                      |
| 9                                                              |
|READY                                                           |
|>                                                               |
|                                                                |
|                                                                |
|                                                                |
|                                                                |
|                                                                |
|                                                                |
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
$

Nasty brown-out a few days ago

Computer went down but memory stick lights still on. They’re off when I shut down normally. It took longer than usual to come back up. But it did. Whew!

This reminded me of the old days where the file system was probably ext (as opposed to ext4) and it probably wouldn’t recover…even with fsck.

Kitchen Tech

How did I go all these years without a digital kitchen scale? I had a manual…highly inaccurate scale I used for years. Somehow I tried to convince myself that it was somewhat accurate. I usually had to tap the side for the needle to move to a more convincing looking weight. Not surprisingly the individual packages seemed to vary greatly. I buy 5lbs of hamburger and divide them into 4 ~1 lb freezer bags that I flatten so they will thaw fairly quickly. The final portion I split into small hamburger sized bags. I bought this for < $10 and it must weigh 6 oz…very light.

It has a cool feature that if you place a object on it, for example a bowl, before turning it on it will adjust for that object and still start at zero. So you can fill the bowl with something and it will give you only the weight of the contents.

One feature very important to me is for tech, if possible, is to use regular batteries. This uses AAA batteries, many use odd harder to find batteries. I hate to have to look for these tiny round specialty batteries with hard to remember numbers.