Javascript TRS-80 News

Sep 16,2024

Release of version 1.6 which now supports HTML5 sound. Try OPUS-1 if your browser supports Web Audio and your device is fast enough. For a cruder test, press enter a couple of times to get into BASIC and type CSAVE "A". That's the sound of a BASIC program being saved to cassette tape.

The TRS-80 hires adapator is now supported for browsers which support canvas.

Jun 6,2013

Alan Hensel has set up a page (http://www.mindspring.com/~alanh/trs80/) where you can play his very own creation, PAC-80, on the web.

Thanks also to Alan for taking the time to report problems with the Z-80 emulation that PAC-80 brought to the surface (now fixed).

Aug 2,2012

Luis Tedeschi has moved his TRS-80 retrospective page to a new location.

Jun 1,2012

Carston Altena has created a page (http://www.carstenaltena.nl/TRS 80/) which gives you a feel for what a real Model III looks like. And it greatly improves on my plain look!

Added Invasion Force game to the emulator page.

Mar 30,2012

Release of version 1.4. Fixed a error in handling single-quote comments when loading ASCII BASIC programs.

Changed the drawing method to use drawImage instead of putImageData on the canvas. The former is strangely much faster on current releases of Firefox and Safari.

Mar 25,2012

Added a Retro-Zap page for all to play Shawn Delaney's brand new old game Retro-Zap

Mar 6,2011

Release of version 1.3 which added support for the cassette (.cas) format and the loading of binary BASIC programs. Added a sample machine-level debugger.

Numerous forgotten small bug fixes including adding some error messages if files fail to load or parse properly.

Jan 9,2011

Link to another online Javascript TRS-80, jTandy, written by the prolific Antonio Villena.

Jan 14,2011

Release 1.2 of the emulator.

Jan 1,2011

Added a page comparing browser performance running the Javascript emulator. Contemporary broswers can almost universally handle the Z-80 emulation but the canvas drawing at 30 fps can still make machines struggle. As of 2012, handheld systems are getting closer to real-time.

Other Pages

A few people have embedded the emulator in their own pages. Here are the ones I know about.

Arthur Gleckler's page for Weerd a TRS-80 game he wrote back in the machine's salad days. The online emulator doesn't support sound so you can't hear the cool speech effects.

Luis Tedeschi posted a nice retrospective on the TRS-80 along with an expanded library of programs to run. (Jan 2015: links updated)

Original demo page of the Javascript TRS-80 emulator

Peter Phillips, January 2, 2015,