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Ha! Level 1 Basic? With just two strings A$ and B$ ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#BASIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#BASIC I remember having to

by ck2 12y ago

Ha! Level 1 Basic? With just two strings A$ and B$ ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#BASIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#BASIC I remember having to pay $300 for the Level 2 upgrade, just a rom change. Had to save everything to audio cassette three times just in case they went bad. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Cassette_tape_drive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Cassette_tape_drive Then fortunately the IBM PC came out with a whopping 160KB single sided 5.25" floppy disk.

VLM 12y ago
I believe level 1 is the key to the claim at the end that the M3 had no graphics mode. The M3 had blocky character based graphics (non-ASCII) as seen at: http://www.classiccmp.org/cpmarchives/trs80/mirrors/www.discover-net.net/~dmkeil/software/trs-DOS.htm http://www.classiccmp.org/cpmarchives/trs80/mirrors/www.disc... Look for example at trsdos 1.3 on a model 3, I saw that screen a lot in the early 80s. Much like the emulator author, my first computer was also a model 3. Fun times. Later moved on to the coco and OS/9 and its K+R C compiler and all that. After using OS/9 for years, downgrading to msdos for about a decade was quite a bummer, till I upgraded to linux. (And edited to add, noobs don't understand that software always declines to $0. Dev environments used to always be $250 or even the Borland/Turbo series were $99. So $300 for basic isn't unrealistic. Text editors used to be expensive. Well, this is specialized and complicated software that only specialists use and they need lots of expensive support, insert all the arguments you hear today about CAD or office software. Then growing up in the 80s and paying $99 to fool around with Turbo Pascal or Turbo Prolog and then in the early 90s being able to install better stuff for free with linux? Wow. Office software is already free, and soon CAD and everything else will join it. Good luck selling expensive software, you can't do that for long, it all eventually drops to zero.)
- ck2 12y ago
  Yeah graphics were blocks. But blocks inspired me to figure out how write breakout on the TRS-80 and get it to move fast enough for realtime by optimizations. Unfortunately I didn't even have a cassette recorder to start with so I just memorized the code and would start from scratch each time and try to write it better than before.
- lkesteloot 12y ago
  My emulator does Level 3. The difference is the language itself. The graphics were the same for both (blocky, as you say).
pkroll 12y ago
Level 2 Upgrade was also the 16K RAM, IIRC. Which I might not, but I know I got both the ROM and RAM upgrade at the same time, and if it'd been more than $300 I think my parents would have sold ME.

by ck2 12y ago

VLM 12y ago

I believe level 1 is the key to the claim at the end that the M3 had no graphics mode. The M3 had blocky character based graphics (non-ASCII) as seen at: http://www.classiccmp.org/cpmarchives/trs80/mirrors/www.discover-net.net/~dmkeil/software/trs-DOS.htm http://www.classiccmp.org/cpmarchives/trs80/mirrors/www.disc... Look for example at trsdos 1.3 on a model 3, I saw that screen a lot in the early 80s. Much like the emulator author, my first computer was also a model 3. Fun times. Later moved on to the coco and OS/9 and its K+R C compiler and all that. After using OS/9 for years, downgrading to msdos for about a decade was quite a bummer, till I upgraded to linux. (And edited to add, noobs don't understand that software always declines to $0. Dev environments used to always be $250 or even the Borland/Turbo series were $99. So $300 for basic isn't unrealistic. Text editors used to be expensive. Well, this is specialized and complicated software that only specialists use and they need lots of expensive support, insert all the arguments you hear today about CAD or office software. Then growing up in the 80s and paying $99 to fool around with Turbo Pascal or Turbo Prolog and then in the early 90s being able to install better stuff for free with linux? Wow. Office software is already free, and soon CAD and everything else will join it. Good luck selling expensive software, you can't do that for long, it all eventually drops to zero.)

ck2 12y ago
Yeah graphics were blocks. But blocks inspired me to figure out how write breakout on the TRS-80 and get it to move fast enough for realtime by optimizations. Unfortunately I didn't even have a cassette recorder to start with so I just memorized the code and would start from scratch each time and try to write it better than before.
lkesteloot 12y ago
My emulator does Level 3. The difference is the language itself. The graphics were the same for both (blocky, as you say).

pkroll 12y ago

Level 2 Upgrade was also the 16K RAM, IIRC. Which I might not, but I know I got both the ROM and RAM upgrade at the same time, and if it'd been more than $300 I think my parents would have sold ME.