4 ms·
Really nice work! The Model 4p must have had a better disk controller and software than my Model 1. The Model 1 used a Western Digital 1771 controller that req
by Starwatcher2001 12y ago
Really nice work!
The Model 4p must have had a better disk controller and software than my Model 1. The Model 1 used a Western Digital 1771 controller that required a pause between writing a disk command and reading the status. A few NOPs would do, but early versions of TRSDOS missed the pause out, causing frequent crashes.
I never did movies on it, but in 1980 managed to get it to record a few seconds of recognisable speech using the I/O line in the cassette port. Filled the massive 48k memory in no time.
- gp2000 12y agoI think the 4p has a Western Digital 1773 controller. I don't know if it is much better beyond supporting double density. My code does wait on status checks after writing commands. Maybe that's not necessary, but I haven't done floppy drive programming before this so I followed the example code closely. Doing some speech recording back in the day -- heady stuff! I've always wondered how Big Five (and other) TRS-80 games managed to get reasonable voice output considering they are 1 bit/sample at 5 KHz. Takes me back, remembering how proud we were that our "baby" computers could speak. And now? Well, let's just say that I wish the "tab is producing audio" icon on Chrome tabs functioned as a mute button.