What do you do? The Real Deal or Emulation? (TRS-80 1/III/IV )

[Omega-TI]

When it comes to nostalgia for the TRS-80 Models 1, III, IV and 4P do you primarily run emulation, or have you taken the dive into the "Real Deal"?

 

If you decided against emulation, what were your main drivers?

If you went emulation only, why?

 

 

[MHaensel]

I'll answer in a general way. Emulation lets me play with way more machines than I have space or money for:

• A Commodore B128
• COMAL 80 on a C64, which was too expensive for me at the time
• A TRS-80 Model II and Tandy 6000 for TRSDOS, CP/M, and XENIX
• A 68K Mac for easy-to-navigate menus and the After Dark: The Simpsons screen saver
• 8088 and 8086 PCs - the first time I heard that IBM PC beep again, I felt like a teenager for a moment

That would be a fair amount of physical hardware, money, and upkeep with real devices.

 

That said, I'd like to own one physical retrocomputer for the full experience. Maybe two. No, wait, three . . . but definitely no more than three-ish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Texas Tandy restorations]

I use emulation when I have to make images for gotek and such and test them out, faster that way, but when I use the TRS-80 I am more focused on what I am doing because well no extra pretty monitor, internet, Facebooks, discord etc. to distract me  

 

[rietveld]

A real trs80 model 1 with expansion interface, and disk drive and a Gotek as a second drive

[desiv]

I use emulation as a tool for working on the real thing.

With my Model 100, I use emulation to more easily convert to/from tokenized basic and text.

I will frequently use emulation to test something I have downloaded to make sure it is what I was looking for...

With my Mac Classic, I use emulation to prep software (decompress, etc) and save it to a disk image, and then I write that disk image to a physical 1.44M floppy and transfer it to the Classic.

 

When I want to actually play er...  I mean do something productive... yeah.. , I go to real hardware...

[Keatah]

For all comps & consoles (except Apple II) I use emulation nearly 100% exclusively. From time to time I'll pull out the real Apple II to verify something or get a blast from the past. And even then I use emulation to support activities like prepping a disk and then putting it on Flash or ADT'ing it over.

 

With TRS-80 I'm all emulation because of balky & bulky hardware that's almost 40+ years old. Not to mention expensive. I don't derive satisfaction from the tedious maintenance required to keep these machines running. But others might, and that's ok.

 

There's another thread that talks about someone building a Pi into a Model III case. And that's cool because I see it as a casemod rather than a real TRS-80. And I hope do do something like that with the Model II if I ever get time. It's a trend that's growing in popularity.

 

[Omega-TI]

Sadly, I had to go the emulation route.  I have a version for the RPi-3 and another version I like better on the PC.  I would have preferred to have gone with the real deal, but lack of space, lack of time and lack of extra hobby funds to obtain, restore and improve one all conspired to force me down the emulation path.  Too many irons in the fire I'm afraid.

[Keatah]

Absolutely no need to feel bad about going the emulation route. Sooner or later it is what lets you balance out your collection, rightsize your collection, and still enjoy many other systems. Don't think of it forcing you or anything. It's there to help you out!

 

If we had a physical example of every system out there.. well.. I could only imagine the horror at all the space being taken up. Your life being taken over. Being skid-row broke. And of course like you say, time. I could not imagine myself spending a winter season meticulously restoring an old rig I might have gotten from ebay. Not anymore.

 

Emulation is a great tool to let you experience many many many systems' software straight away in a reliable manner.