retro-computing
Monday, 13 April 2026 07:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eThis has been fun.
While packing my stuff up, sorting through what gets kept and what discarded, I found some old printouts of programs from way back in 1983 of a very simple circle drawing algorithm. I brought those inside with me after I'd had enough of packing for the day, and that night I downloaded and installed a TRS-80 emulator so that I could experiment with it.
I soon found that the method of getting programs into the emulator was absurdly complicated. I'd have to convert the text file into a pretend cassette file, which I could tell the emulator about via a special file, which acted like a cassette player, then issue the CLOAD command in the emulator itself.
I figured there must be a better way. And I was right.
I rigged up a tiny RoxApp icon on my desktop (though it could just as easily be in the menu, or one of the icons on the taskbar. I would highlight the text of the program in any text editor on my Linux computer, select the emulator's window, then click on this RoxApp which I'd set up to use xclip and xdotool to send the highlighted text to the emulator as if I'd typed it. It also used sed to convert all the line ends from Unix (\n) to TRS-80 (\r).
After that I started to wonder if I could get it to use my old System80 ROM instead of the standard Model 1, Level2 ROM. That works too, though with a few small problems. I can only enable some of the extra capabilities, otherwise, for some odd reason it types keypresses twice. But I have lowercase, which I most wanted. Yay!
Retro-computing to explore the early algorithms upon which all our computers stand.
Super-interesting stuff.
While packing my stuff up, sorting through what gets kept and what discarded, I found some old printouts of programs from way back in 1983 of a very simple circle drawing algorithm. I brought those inside with me after I'd had enough of packing for the day, and that night I downloaded and installed a TRS-80 emulator so that I could experiment with it.
I soon found that the method of getting programs into the emulator was absurdly complicated. I'd have to convert the text file into a pretend cassette file, which I could tell the emulator about via a special file, which acted like a cassette player, then issue the CLOAD command in the emulator itself.
I figured there must be a better way. And I was right.
I rigged up a tiny RoxApp icon on my desktop (though it could just as easily be in the menu, or one of the icons on the taskbar. I would highlight the text of the program in any text editor on my Linux computer, select the emulator's window, then click on this RoxApp which I'd set up to use xclip and xdotool to send the highlighted text to the emulator as if I'd typed it. It also used sed to convert all the line ends from Unix (\n) to TRS-80 (\r).
xclip -o | sed -z 's/\n/\r/g' | xdotool type --file -And it works beautifully.
After that I started to wonder if I could get it to use my old System80 ROM instead of the standard Model 1, Level2 ROM. That works too, though with a few small problems. I can only enable some of the extra capabilities, otherwise, for some odd reason it types keypresses twice. But I have lowercase, which I most wanted. Yay!
Retro-computing to explore the early algorithms upon which all our computers stand.
Super-interesting stuff.