Ted over at Microcore Labs has been developing a modern Z-80, which he calls MCLZ8, which can plug directly into a Model III.

MCLZ8, is a Zilog Z80 emulator which can be used as a drop-in replacement for the original Z80. It uses a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller board which contains an 800Mhz microcontroller and a small PCB to perform the voltage translation between the motherboard and the microcontroller. The MCLZ8’s Z80 emulation passes the exhaustive ZEXALL opcode test suite and the speedy microcontroller allows the ability to simultaneously mimic the Z80’s local bus interface.

You can read about his project here.

Some videos of the MCLZ8 in action are here.

Stuart Feldhamer, who makes the “Lets Play” videos showing real TRS-80 games being played on his YouTube Channel Stu’s Game Reviews, has uncovered a MUCH better quality copy of the Misosys Disassembler/Exatron Version I Manual than had been previously available.

You can download this cleaner copy here.

Thank you, Stuart!

Quentin Barnes has released v4.9 of the Catweasel Tools originally written by Tim Mann. Many updates to this version were written by Tim!

Changelog:

• The main new feature of this release is the -R option for cw2dmk. It provides the ability to replay a previously saved log as input to cw2dmk rather than reading from physical media. This will allow users of cw2dmk to pass along strange or unexpected media read behaviors to the maintainers as files without having to mail diskettes.
• Catch errors when writing to files. Report and exit when errors are seen.
• Add -X min_retry feature to cw2dmk, accepting the same syntax for min_retry as for -x max_retry.
• Add QUIRK_IAM to -q option in cw2dmk.
• Add QUIRK_EXTRA_DATA to -q option in cw2dmk.
• Various minor cleanup of code and the cw2dmk usage message.

You can download from Github..

The next TRS-80 Trash Talk Live will be Saturday, April 30th at 9PM Eastern / 6PM Pacific.

You can watch on the TRS-80 Trash Talk channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXkGugvdCkpkMDylVQb9gfg.

If you want to participate in the live zoom session, reach out to trs80trashtalk at gmail dot com for information.

TRS80GP has been updated to v2.4.7. Release Notes:

New Features:

• Orchestra-90 support (No stereo; mixed to MONO).
• Added menu entry to unload symbols from previous .bds file/symbol loads.

New Command Line Options:

• -haste option faster than turbo but graphics emulation compromized.

Fixes:

• FDC 0xd8 command modified so SuperUtilty boots with Percom doubler.
• Add slight jitter on Model III disk emulation to handle problems with perfect 200ms rotations colliding with 60Hz interrupt.
• Improved display of IDAM and DAM CRC errors in disk image debug tools.

Visit the TRS80GP Web Page for the download and information, or here for the emulator.

Tarkie was kind enough to scan the Color Graphic Printer Service Manual.

At the moment it is missing the larger exploded-printer pages 50-53, and should those get scanned, I will update.

You can download the service manual from the Printer Section of the Radio Shack Service Manual Page.

Shawn Sijnstra has created release 1 of his INFOCOM EXECUTOR for the Model I and the Model III.

You can get the source and executables from the respective GitHub pages of https://gitlab.com/sijnstra1/m1zvm and https://gitlab.com/sijnstra1/m3zvm.

Jens Guenther has updated his fork of the SDLTRS Emulator to version 1.2.23. Changelog includes:

Updates:

• Added Anitek MegaMem card for TRS-80 Model III and 4/4P.
• Added support for TRS-Model III 4 MHz speedup hardware.
• Added SIO (serial port) for TCS Genie IIIs.
• Added TCS Genie IIs/SpeedMaster RAM 192 B memory expansion.

Fixes:

• Fixed TCS Genie IIs/SpeedMaster emulation.
• Fixed boot of G-DOS 2.4 for Genie I/II.

You can download the most recent SDLTRS II from the Gitlab page: https://gitlab.com/jengun/sdltrs.

Shawn Sijnstra has updated his Infocom Executor to version 12. Changelog includes:

• Implemented “sentence space” – cosmetic fix for Shogun
• Tuning colour support
• Code rewriting for speed and space including maths routines and disk save/load
• Added command line switch for turning off sound
• Fixed cosmetic issue on restart for z3
• Improved save error handling
• Reorganised source code and memory map, increasing cache to 21K

Full list of credits, features and issues as well as the source and compiled code are in the Gitlab page: https://gitlab.com/sijnstra1/m4zvm.

John Roach, a key person in the bringing of the TRS-80 to market, has pased away.

You can read an article about John here..