Ken Brookner has given permission to put his “General Troubleshooting Starting Points” on the repairs page. For anyone having trouble with their TRS-80, this is an excellent overview as to what to try.

TRS80GP has been updated to v2.4.3. Release Notes:

• Drag and drop to run program files.
• 68000 instruction fix has UNOS booting on Model 16.
• Instruction and data breakpoints in .BDS files allow automatic memory protection.
• Debugger resizable and disassembly shows more by using full height of dialog.
• -win command line option works in linux now.
• Crude Orchestra-85 emulation.
• Command line loading of SYSTEM programs turns off cursor before running them.
• Preliminiary cassette I/O in in .cpt (Cassette Pulse Train) format.
• Cassette file mounting breaks out individual files better and crashes less.
• Keyboard ghosting menu option.

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

Dusty has released the March 2021 issue of the TRS8Bit newsletter. Here’s what he had to say:

Articles in this issue feature, Non-syncing M4 videos, part 2 of building the super Micro – Mark 2 and adding More disk drives on a HD system from Ian Mavric, the Teletype M33 remembered by Andrew Wong, Lawrence Kesteloot’s TRS80-TOOL, F12 Key from E.T. Fonehume, ROM errors by Vernon Hester, Destiny Hunter, running a Model 100 from a USB power supply, drawing the USA flag by Kyle Wadsten, Harold Finch ‘Stretches your mind’, details of the recent Basque Tournament from Egoitz Campo, VHD, News from France with Pascal Holdry, MakeVHD – for you 8” guys & Keytronics keyboard repairs from Hans Rietveld. There’s also the usual roundup of, Ebay, ‘The way we were’ and ‘Assembler Bytes Back’ and finally, don’t forget the 2021 competition.

I hope I’ve managed to find something of interest for everyone!

The latest release of George and Peter Phillips’s TRS-80 emulator, trs80gp (version 2.4.3) is just about to BE RELEASED. It now includes emulation added for UNOS booting on the Model 16, a resizable debugging window and ‘drag and drop’ program running. (It still, of course, has the M1 Aculab Floppy tape emulation). This is the ONLY emulator in the world to offer all these facilities.

Full details are available from their website or ‘page 3’ of the latest edition of TRS8BIT.

It can be downloaded from his web site.

Steven Lewis has written a new TRS-80 game. Well, that’s not entirely true. He wrote a game in C that he was able to compile to run on the Pet, Apple II, Commodore 64, and the TRS-80!

The game, Destiny Hunter, along with instructions and downloads can be found at http://www.destinyhunter.org/. The C source code can be found at https://github.com/voidstar78/DestinyHunter.

UPDATE: Claimed

A site visitor has advised of the following availability … free for local pickup:

I have one Model 4 and a Model III in a Model 4 case (don’t ask), plus various manuals and programming books (as well as some random primarily office application software). The 4 has one non-functioning floppy drive. They are located in Seattle, Washington.

I will relay messages (that don’t ask for shipping) sent to me in the order received – email to contest at trs-80 dot com. First come first served.

Quentin Barnes has updated his DMKBSC utility to v0.0.2

DMKBSC will parse a DMK and advise as to which specific sectors which are bad, if any. DMKBSC runs under LINUX, Rasperry Pi, Windows x32, Windows x64, and under MSDOS.

THe new version includes Windows x32, Windows x64, and Rasperry Pi versions, but does not change the functionality from v0.0.1.

A Tarball with binaries and with the source of v0.0.2 can be downloaded GITHUB, or from the DSK and DMK Image Utilities page on this site.

The next TRS-80 Trash Talk live show is Saturday, May 29th at 5pm Eastern

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.

Lawrence Kesteloot has updated his TRS-80 Cassette command line tool to v2.06.

A new info command was added to give some information about the contents of the input file *AND* it can now output multi-file CAS images.

It runs under NODEJ, Linux, macOS, and Windows. It can be downloaded from Lawrence’s site or locally from the The Virtual Tape Utilities page on this site.

Jay Newirth has created a circuit board which will permit a current-day Meanwell power supply to power a Model III.

You can purchase the meanwell supply, the circuit board, and/or the cabling a la carte, or you can purchase the entire set, all on https://www.plaidvest.com/newsoft/.

Lawrence Kesteloot has updated, or actually rewritten, his TRS-80 Cassette command line tool to support many new functions. Called “TRS80-TOOL” it is a command-line tool for manipulating TRS-80 files. Current version is v2.04

Although it doesn’t necessarily support ALL possible combinations, it supports the following file types of input and outout: BAS, ASC, WAV, CAS, CMD, 3BN (a machine language program as stored on cassette), JV1, JV3, DMK, and LST (an assembly language listing file).

What this means is that the tool can convert from CMD to SYSTEM format (CMD to 3BN), detokenize BAS to ASCII (BAS to ASC), multiple files into a single WAV (BAS, 3BN, and CMD to WAV), and a disk to a wav (DMK to WAV). Conversion of tape to disk will convert 3BN to CMD.

It can also extract files from WAV, CAS, and DMK to a directory.

The main page for TRS80-TOOL can be found at https://github.com/lkesteloot/trs80/tree/master/packages/trs80-tool along with instructions.

It runs under NODEJ, Linux, macOS, and Windows. It can be downloaded from Lawrence’s site, the The Virtual Tape Utilities page on this site or right here for Windows / Linux / Mac.