TRS-80 Diskette to DMK Conversion – TRSREAD & TRSWRITE Manual

TRSREAD & TRSWRITE for Windows — Freeware Utilities to Manipulate TRS-80 Disk Images

TRSREAD and TRSWRITE are command line utilities that can manipulate TRS-80 virtual disk images. They perform many of the same functions as TRSTools, but are good for batch operations because they operate on the Windows command line. (Note: these are Windows console mode programs, NOT MS-DOS programs.)

TRSREAD.EXE

TRSREAD.EXE is a command line Windows program that reads selected files from TRS-80 virtual disk files and transfers them into the current directory. The TRSREAD command line looks like this:

TRSREAD [options] virtual disk [files]

The [options] and [files] on the command line are optional. Possible options are:

For example, to see the directory of SAMPLE.DSK, the command line would look like this:

TRSREAD SAMPLE.DSK

You don’t actually have to use the -v option, because it is the default. However, if you would prefer, you could also use this command line to accomplish the same thing:

TRSREAD -v SAMPLE.DSK

To extract all files from SAMPLE.DSK that begin with the letter S, including invisible and system files, the command line would look like this (notice the use of wildcards):

TRSREAD -e -i -s SAMPLE.DSK S*.*

To extract the visible, non-system files LETTER1/TXT, LETTER2/TXT, and ADDRESS/TXT from SAMPLE.DSK, the command line would look like this:

TRSREAD -e SAMPLE.DSK LETTER1/TXT LETTER2/TXT ADDRESS/TXT

To extract all visible, non-system files from SAMPLE.DSK while overwriting any identically named files, the command line would look like this:

TRSREAD -o -e SAMPLE.DSK *.*

Note that when files are extracted from TRS-80 virtual disk files, the resulting files are always copied into the current directory.

TRSWRITE.EXE

TRSWRITE.EXE is a command line Windows program that copies files onto TRS-80 virtual disk files. The TRSWRITE command line looks like this:

TRSWRITE [option] virtual disk file or wildcard

There is only one option:

For example, to copy the Windows file LETTER1.TXT onto the virtual disk file SAMPLE.DSK, the command line would look like this:

TRSWRITE SAMPLE.DSK LETTER1.TXT

To copy all files starting with B and with a .DOC extension onto SAMPLE.DSK without querying when overwriting a file, the command line would look like this:

TRSWRITE -o SAMPLE.DSK B.DOC*

To copy the files LETTER1.TXT, LETTER2.TXT, and ADDRESS.TXT into SAMPLE.DSK would require three command lines:

TRSWRITE SAMPLE.DSK LETTER1.TXT
TRSWRITE SAMPLE.DSK LETTER2.TXT
TRSWRITE SAMPLE.DSK ADDRESS.TXT