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In an effort to re-ignite my first love whilst on my leave of absence — I’ve been look­ing for a good TRS-80 emu­lator to rekindle the flames of tech­nical desire. Also over the last 4 weeks I’ve also had a small “side pro­ject” watch­ing the goings on in the desktop vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion space, espe­cially on the Mac. Par­al­lels has been an excel­lent invest­ment to get Win­dows XP run­ning on the Mac­Book Pro; just wait­ing for the ACPI/Direct3D (or VMWare for the Mac) ver­sion so I can run a build of Win­dows Vista.

Admis­sion #1: the first com­puter my dad pur­chased for me was a TRS-80 Model I. Not the pret­ti­est, nor the most power­ful of machines — 1.77Mhz with 16Mb Kilo­bytes (I even acci­dently put Mb!) of RAM. Wel­come to 1981. That’s right, 1981. 25 years/ a quarter of a cen­tury ago.

The best emu­lator for the TRS-80 is writ­ten by Mat­thew Reed. Found thanks to
Ira Goldklang’s TRS-80 web site. So, I have TRS32 run­ning inside Win­dows XP in Par­al­lels on MacOS X. Shells within Shells.

Admis­sion #2: the TRS-80 we owned stored data onto a cas­sette, not a floppy disk. Way-back when I was one of those computer-store kids. Thanks to the sales guys at Tandy Electronics/Radio Shack, we’d spend all day sit­ting on the com­puters typ­ing in pro­grams and occa­sion­ally demon­strat­ing to pro­spect­ive buy­ers. As floppy disks were expens­ive, we didn’t get access to stor­age — so TRSDOS was not an envir­on­ment I was ever exposed to. Get­ting the emu­lator work­ing involved remem­ber­ing how to get BASIC work­ing, and learn­ing yet another OS.

Admis­sion #3: I’ve watched zero minutes of Lord of the Rings. Even from DVD. Ever since the school lib­rar­ian sug­ges­ted I bor­row The Hob­bit, attempt­ing to read a single page, and quickly return­ing the mush — I’ve act­ively avoided the fantasy genre. World of War­craft drives me nuts. Sorry Neil and Mark!

Before this dis­pas­sion arose, I did get into one fantasy-style game on the TRS-80: “Quest for the Key of Night­shade”. It is strange how you remem­ber names such as these for many years. Last week I found a ver­sion of the BASIC pro­gram, ori­gin­ally typed all the lines from a com­puter magazine into Basic and saved to cas­sette, on Ira’s web­site. From memory, this was writ­ten by a Cana­dian pro­gram­mer and won “TRS-80 game of the year 1981″ in some US magazine and was reprin­ted in 1982 by Aus­tralian Per­sonal Com­puter.

The screen dump above is from this game. Ahh, the fond memor­ies of our first loves.