'Trash-80' escapes the dustbin of history with new TRS-80 emulator

Run the classic Model III on Windows

Antique Code Show If you get misty-eyed over the expression 20 IF N=1 GOTO 10 (or reach for the pen to correct me), there's another open source TRS-80 BASIC emulator available.

This one reproduces the Sharp 80, a TRS-80 Model III 8-bit machine, and its author, Matthew Hamilton, has put in a lot of work to give the world the glory of white-on-black.

It's fully self-contained with ROM and disk operating system built in, and Hamilton claims its Z-80 CPU emulation passes the ZEXALL opcode tests.

The Windows requirements are pretty straightforward: the free community MS Visual Studio 2017 or better; and the SharpDX library 3.1.0, published at sharpdx.org.

Here's some other details on the emulator:

• Standard 2.03MHz operation (you can also see what a TRS-80 would be like at up to 100 MHz);
• The emulation includes “all undocumented opcodes”;
• As many as four virtual floppy drives, covering the DMK, JV3, and JV1 formats.
• Video modes include wide characters and Kanji.

Source code is, naturally, at GitHub.

The author doesn't have a windows machine handy, but if you get it running, just Google “one line TRS-80 games” for some quick and easy tests. ®