Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
This last weekend at the local HAM flea market I was hooked into acquiring a TRS-80 Model 100. ($45 for a unit in quite good cosmetic condition, a slipcover, and three manuals. I realize that probably wasn't quite the "deal of the century" but not too terrible.) I've fiddled with it a few hours and it seems to work fine. It's sort of exciting to actually have one, I suppose, a mere... thirty years after first poking at one in a Radio Shack store. (Suddenly I feel old.) I gather that "Club 100" is the place to go to get most questions someone might have about a "Model T" answered, but to be honest I've sort of been having a little trouble finding things just searching around the site; it could well be that I have sort of dumb questions. (It does sort of seem like the site's organization assumes you've owned a Model 100 long enough to know the basics, and in particular you're familiar with the external floppy drives or things that emulate them.) Thus I was sort of wondering if there were any aficionados of the machines that might be able to shed light on a few of the dumber ones.
1: Double/triple checking: For a power supply brick you need one that supplies six volts DC with *center negative* on the barrel plug?
2: The comm program seems to be very... sparse, when it comes to file transfer options, IE, it looks like you're pretty much limited to pushing an ASCII file or manually receiving one. Is there a good binary-transfer/XModem widget I should be looking for to keep handy in RAM? (I did see some programs for doing hex encoding/decoding in the Club 100 library, is that the way to go?)
3: When I did some ASCII transfers at 9600 baud I got a fair number of errors when the Model 100 was on the receiving side. (corrupted/transposed characters mostly, the occasional drop) Am I simply going too fast or does this indicate a handshaking issue? (My serial cable is sort of a hack job assembled out of server/network device console adapters so it may not be completely kosher from the Tandy's point of view.)
4: Is there a program out there for converting .wav files of the 100's cassette output into files? (and vice-versa?) I've seriously tried finding such a thing but have failed. They exist for most other old computers, so it has to be out there. (I was thinking an audio line-in adapter for my smartphone *could* let me use that for portable storage. The other option I've been pondering is an RS-232 to Bluetooth dongle and a Bluetooth terminal program, but the dongles are a little spendy. Not *terrible*, but slightly painful.) Granted it's pretty unlikely I'd go somewhere "for real" very often with the Model 100 but it might be fun once.
Thanks!
1: Double/triple checking: For a power supply brick you need one that supplies six volts DC with *center negative* on the barrel plug?
2: The comm program seems to be very... sparse, when it comes to file transfer options, IE, it looks like you're pretty much limited to pushing an ASCII file or manually receiving one. Is there a good binary-transfer/XModem widget I should be looking for to keep handy in RAM? (I did see some programs for doing hex encoding/decoding in the Club 100 library, is that the way to go?)
3: When I did some ASCII transfers at 9600 baud I got a fair number of errors when the Model 100 was on the receiving side. (corrupted/transposed characters mostly, the occasional drop) Am I simply going too fast or does this indicate a handshaking issue? (My serial cable is sort of a hack job assembled out of server/network device console adapters so it may not be completely kosher from the Tandy's point of view.)
4: Is there a program out there for converting .wav files of the 100's cassette output into files? (and vice-versa?) I've seriously tried finding such a thing but have failed. They exist for most other old computers, so it has to be out there. (I was thinking an audio line-in adapter for my smartphone *could* let me use that for portable storage. The other option I've been pondering is an RS-232 to Bluetooth dongle and a Bluetooth terminal program, but the dongles are a little spendy. Not *terrible*, but slightly painful.) Granted it's pretty unlikely I'd go somewhere "for real" very often with the Model 100 but it might be fun once.
Thanks!