Are there any M2 emulators?

[wolfenstein]

Now that there is a source to Tandy Model II Disk images at
http://pski.net/trs-80-model-ii-archive-project/
does anyone know of a good MII Emulator, either existing or in development.

I have used the MESS version, but it has problems.
It won't mount many of the disk images from pski.
The ones that load (Visicalc is one), the arrow keys don't function.
The keyboard emulator settings don't seem to work.
That's about as far as I have gotten. Without arrow key function, you can't do much!

It would certainly be nice to be able to run the old MII software
without having to set up the huge MII equipment, for which I have no room.

 

[pski]

Welcome to the Forum!

MAME, which incorporated MESS, is the only option for M2 emulation at this point. I’m not sure if anyone is actively working on it at this time. It certainly has some limitations, but many titles should work adequately.

If you post your issues, I’ll try to verify on my side, both MAME and real M2, so you’ll know if it is just your setup or an issue with the emulator or the image.

 

[wolfenstein]

I am using Mess0161b with the Messui front end.
I only have one PC that can run MESS, a Abit KV80 with a Sempron 3400+ CPU and ATI X700 Video Card.
Both of my other PCs with Nvidia video cards crash when trying to run Mess.exe. I have read that this is a known issue.

My main issue at the moment is that I the arrow keys do not function in any of the M2 disks that I can boot.
26-4511.IMD Visicalc from PSKI site
26-4521.IMD Adv Visicalc from PSKI site
26-4580.IMD Multiplan from PSKI site
The disks all mount and boot ok. I can load the software. Most all of the keys function except the arrow keys.
I have tried combinations of Full and Partial Emulation with no success. The natural option does not work at all.
I have tried Customizing Emulated Keyboard. but keys are all set correctly.
I have even tried mapping the LEFT-RIGHT-UP-DOWN keys to F9-F10-F11-F12, but still no function.
I can map letters to the arrow keys, so I know the arrow keys are seen by the system. Just no arrow scrolling function.

There is a message that pops up when I load the M2 system.
"ONE OR MORE ROMs/CHDs FOR THIS SYSTEM HAVE NOT BEEN CORRECTLY DUMPED.
THE KEYBOARD EMULATION MAY NOT BE 100% ACCURATE."
So, is this a ROM problem??

I got my M2 roms originally from a link at
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthre...-II-emulator-in-MESS-now-working-with-caveats
The link was
http://archive.org/download/MESS-0....151.BIOS.ROMs.zip/MESS 0.151 ROMs/trs80m2.zip
which got me the roms in "trs80m2.zip".

If I load mess.exe directly, i get the following message:
"65-1991.z4 NOT FOUND (NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN)"
and then the M2 screen loads.

I cannot find 65-1991.z4 rom download with this file included. The only hit I get is:
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?53245-Model-2-emulator/page5

So right now, I am kind of at a loss as to what the problem is. I have just recently started using the MESS emulator again.
I had originally set this all up about 2 years ago with Mess0161b to try running some M2 software.
But without arrow keys functioning, the software becomes quite unusable.
This is certainly not like Matthew Reeds TRS32, which allows me to run almost anything for M1-M3-M4.

Finally, these images from PSKI that I tried to run were problems:
Scripsit 2.0 (26-4531-v2.0.IMD) - Would not Mount - "UNABLE TO IDENTIFY IMAGE FORMAT"
Scripsit 2.1 (26-4531-v2.1.IMD) - Mounted but during loading, got "**ERROR 40**, Critical Read Error - Abort"
Formation (26-45281.IMD) - Mounted but during loading, got "**ERROR 40**, Critical Read Error - Abort"
Profile Plus (26-4515.IMD) - Mounted but during loading, got "**ERROR 40**, Critical Read Error - Abort"

I am really disappointed that Scripsit 2.0 and Profile Plus would not work.
I used to use these extensively in the early 80's and I was hoping to try them out again.
Oh, well.

 

[pski]

So, I tested all of these tonight on both my MAME installation on my MacBook Pro and on a real Model II.

26-4531 Scriptsit 2.0 had a bad IMD header in the archive. I've uploaded a fixed image to the archive. Thanks for finding that!

For Visicalc, I experienced the same issue as you did in the emulator...arrow keys not working. I don't have a solution to this as I am not a MAME expert. The other titles did load for me except they had various issues. e.g. I could start Scriptsit but could not get a new document started. But, I did get past the TRSDOS load screen without issue on each title. And they each worked flawlessly on the real Model II.

Sorry you did not have a good experience with MAME, but I have not had great success with it either and don't normally use it. I'm afraid this won't change until a dedicated Model II fan gets up the energy, time and has the skill to tackle solving its problems. Btw, I am using MAME v 0.170.

You may want to give this thread a read:

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?53245-Model-2-emulator&highlight=MAME

 

[wolfenstein]

@ pski;
Thanks for the feedback.

I ran the Scripsit 2.0 file that you fixed and it mounted and loaded ok. Same problem as you. I could not create a new document.
This might have something to do with how Model II Scripsit saves files with its own directory structure (DOCUMENT/CTL).
I was able to run Multiplan and Visicalc ok (except for arrow key non-function). I could save a testfile to disk and load from disk on each.
If the arrow keys worked, I think these two apps would be fully functional.

I still could not load Formation, Scripsit 2.1, or Profile Plus (I could run Profile II, however). This may be corrected in v0.170.

With all the non-functionality, I don't think I will bother updating MESS now. The problems really ruin the experience.
Programs on MESS really run very slowly. On my old M2, this was not the case.

Back when I used the M2 regularly, I always preferred the M2 to my M3. The programs were all easier to use and worked pretty flawlessly.
Using Scripsit 2.0 and Profile Plus, it was easy to create merged letters. With the DWII printer, I could print 100s of merged documents with very few errors or jams.

Oh well, those were the good old days.

 

[lowen]

I am using Mess0161b with the Messui front end.
...
If I load mess.exe directly, i get the following message:
"65-1991.z4 NOT FOUND (NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN)"
and then the M2 screen loads.

I cannot find 65-1991.z4 rom download with this file included. The only hit I get is:
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?53245-Model-2-emulator/page5
...

Someone needs to build a small dumper for the keyboard microcontroller, an Intel 8021. I took an old MII keyboard and successfully desoldered the 8021, but I've not built the 'verifier' yet that can dump the ROM required. The 8021 uses some interesting algorithms to do this dumping, involving sequenced 12VDC application to certain pins, and it would be a one-off device. A good task for an Arduino with some level shifter/pin drivers that can properly sequence current-limited 12VDC.

I have run the trs-80m2 'game' (as MAME calls it) with as recent as MAME-0190, and am building 0191 right now to test. There are significant artifacts with keyboard handling; with LS-DOS 6.3.1, for instance, you have to make sure it boots twice; the first time it boots the keyboard won't work, but if you reset the emulator (F3 in partial emulation mode, I think) it boots fine ad the keyboard works. One of my disks does a double boot (boots up, then resets itself, and the second time through it works fine).

I don't know if maybe doing the emulated reset button might help you here or not. A dump of the 8021 would probably help.

But at the moment MAME is the only readily available MII emulator around. Aaron Brockbank is or was working on one, but it's not publicly released yet, as far as I know.

At this point, even with the pretty steep learning curve involved, if anyone wants to help with a MII emulator working on the trs80m2 portion of MAME is probably the best bet.

Do note that MESS and MAME are completely integrated at this point, and the build is a bit different than it was when MESS and MAME were built semi-separately. See http://docs.mamedev.org/initialsetup/compilingmame.html for recent build instructions. I'm using CentOS 7, so I have the devtoolset-6 Software Collection installed to get a recent enough gcc. Using the Software Collection is as simple as 'scl enable devtoolset-6 bash' and issuing the 'make REGENIE=1 TOOLS=1 -j9 (I have an i7 quad-core with hyperthreading, and multithreaded make dramatically shortens the build time; raises the temps, too: gkrellm tells me that I'm hitting all eight 'cores' at 99%, and the temps are between 78 and 82 C on all four physical cores (I have a good PNG, but the forum software downsamples that to an unreadable JPG when I upload; the 'thumbnail' is below)). EDIT: Total build time, start to finish, 25 minutes.

 

[wolfenstein]

In running Model II Visicalc and Multiplan further on Mess0161b, I encountered the following:
Both programs can save and read files from disk, but only as long as it is mounted.
When the program .IMD disk is unmounted and remounted later, the saved files were gone.

On Multiplan, I happened upon an old Xenix manual for Multiplan.
To move the Cell Pointer:
Up Ctri·E
Down Ctri·X
Left Ctri·S
Right Ctri·D
I tried these on Multiplan in Mess and these keys worked to move the Cell Pointer.

 

[lowen]

Someone needs to build a small dumper for the keyboard microcontroller, an Intel 8021. ...

Ok, necro-updating this thread (I personally prefer keeping the historical context of an existing thread rather than posting a new one) as it makes searches cleaner, in my opinion. Feel free to disagree; I always reserve the right to be wrong!

As of MAME 0.193, the keyboard ROM is available. You really have to dig to find the binary, but once you pop it into the correct place, MAME >= 0.193 will use it. I just built MAME 0.194 on CentOS 7 (requires a newer GCC than C7 ships with; available in the Software Collections; I used devtoolset-6 to build 0.194) and it seems to run smoother than before, now that the keyboard ROM is available. No, I'm not the source of the ROM, since I never actually finished my dumper project for the 8021 (I was more than a little nervous getting the right 12V sequencing to do the verify readout), but it has been done.

 

[BartH]

I tried to get it working as well and so I compiled the latest version of MAME (0.194) for my Mac. It takes a while but works flawlessly. I can't get it to boot from within the IDE, I use the command line instead. At first it wouldn't the M2 emulation due to the missing ROM-file (the 65-1991.z4) but after inserting it in the TRS-80 rom directory it all works fine, apart from the arrow keys and the function keys :-(
For those of you who can't find the rom-file try this link: http://trs80.nl/bestanden/65-1991.z4
So no luck so far to get Scripsit running, to be continued!

 

[wolfenstein]

So, I was browsing IRA Goldklang's TRS80 site and saw this announcement:

"George and Peter Phillips have released trs80gp version 2.0.4.
It features:
* Model II emulation (and Model I, III and 4 as previously)"

Not expecting much, I downloaded it to give the M2 emulation a try.
Its available at http://48k.ca/trs80gp.html

To my great surprise, the M2 Emulation works surprisingly well!!
MUCH, MUCH better than MESS.
I was able to load Scripsit 2.0, Multiplan, and Visicalc.
I could create new files. Arrow keys functioned ok.
I could save the created files to disk.
The new files were retained on the disk even after unmounting and re-mounting the disk.
The created files could be modified.
With Scripsit, I was able to insert disks in D0 and D1, and the program loaded showing both drives.
There is a simple text mode printer built into the Emulator.
It was able to print the Scripsit file and the Multplan file. Neat!!

I was also able to load Adv Visicalc, Formation, Scripsit 2.1, Profile II, Profile Plus and Versafile.
These programs were only loaded to the menu and then quit.
I plan on trying more with these later.
None of these would even load into MESS.

Program is still a little crude. Runs in Win7 ok, but won't run in WinXP.
No way to RESET. Must basically quit and reload.
All operations are done from the Command Line.
Can't format disks. Tried in Trsdos and Scripsit and created a program error.
Must use all Capital Letters in TRSDOS.

This certainly seems promising for those of us that have been waiting for a decent TRS80 Model 2 Emulator.