I've written a lot of code since 1980, in a lot of different languages. Much of it was written very specifically to solve some problem I was facing at the time. Since the year 2000 I've been deliberately releasing some code I write into the Public Domain or open-sourcing it under the GNU Public License (GPL). I hope that this will help some people and maybe somebody will improve it and release their improvements as I have released the original work.
This is my collection of my recovered TRS-80 programs from around 1981 to 1990. In late 2000 I spent a lot of time extracting the contents of all my TRS-80 diskettes (approx. 200 of them) and I wrote several programs to convert, extract and compare these files. In mid-2002 I started going through the results disk by disk in order to piece together different versions of my source code and arrange them in directories. Now all this code is online for your enjoyment.
Compile/assemble the source code using the Build System (documented below) and run the programs on a TRS-80 emulator. I use xtrs which is packaged for Ubuntu and other Linux distros.
You'll need zmac to cross-assemble and sdcc to cross-compile.
I want to make sure all the code works - which means, as it's largely assembler, that at least it compiles/assembles without errors. Testing the resulting binaries is still on the TODO list; so far I've only tested programs which I'm actively working on.
In the spirit of CI/CD, and inspired by Bazel, all the TRS-80 code is in a single repository and a single command will recursively build all artefacts, controlled by a BUILD.yaml file in each directory.
Back in the 1980s my code was a mess. I only had floppy disks, so the source code for different programs was on different diskettes, and any common files (INCLUDE files or .h files etc) were on multiple diskettes, often with minor changes. There was no Source Code Control System at the time.
I'm applying modern software engineering principles now by de-duplicating common code, using the same name for the same function across different programs, and building libraries for reuse.
On my development VM the entire codebase is rebuit every hour and failures are counted and instrumented. This allowed me to fix the many errors from the original 1980s code over time, and ensure that any introduced errors are noticed and fixed.
For more details, see The Build System
Back in the 1980s I assembled ASM code initially with EDTASM and upgraded
after some time to EDAS (which I modified for Newdos/80 and renamed
to NEDAS). I also tried some Misosys program.
When I first worked on automatic assembling the entire codebase I tried to do it by importing each assembler file to the emulator and assembling it on the emulator, and copying the /CMD file back to Linux. This approach ultimately failed due to bugs and memory limitations in the assembler.
So I moved to cross-assembling and settled on zmac as its assembler
language was close enough to EDAS to make only minimal changes.
But the total amount of assembly code is quite large and I needed some way to do cross referencing and automated code changes. So I built a language parser using the Lark system in python, and implemented:
- basic parser (bin/parse-asm.py)
- cross references (bin/xref-asm.py)
- symbol renamer (bin/rename-symbol.py)
- Remove multiple symbol definitions (bin/remove-multi-defs.py)
Reverse engineering and copy-deprotection of the Microsoft Adventure, also known as Colossal Cave.
The BBS software I wrote starting in 1984, which set me on the path to starting one of Australia's first Internet Service Providers.
The evolution was, from memory:
- Zeta RTRS (Stood for "Remote TRS-80")
- Zeta BBS (including Fidonet node 713/602)
- Zeta Remote Unix or Zeta Dialup Internet (after the addition of a Sun 3/50 server and the shutdown of the venerable RUNX)
- Kralizec and Godzilla (added a Linux server, godzilla)
- Kralizec Internet (going commercial; adding more servers)
- Zeta Internet (after I realised nobody could pronounce or understand Kralizec)
I sold Zeta Internet to Pacific Internet in early 2000, where it was migrated over time into the Pacific Internet systems. What was left of Zeta was sold by Pacific Internet to Telstra some years after I had ceased involvement.
Implementation of argument parsing from the DOS command line into the (argc, argv) format needed by a C program.
getchar() and putchar() which C programs will need.
Model 1/3 compatible time functions.
A function to help identify the (emulated) hardware. It's intended to allow cross-model compiled and assembled code, but there are so many differences between the models that further work is required.
Functions to control the fd1771/fd1791 (emulated) disk interface from C programs
Most of the Newdos/80 documented functions can be called from C programs for efficient use.
A decent subset of STDIO is implemented for C program use (includes fopen, STDOUT/STDERR/STDIN, printf etc).