TRS 80 Model II - Are You a Glutton for Punishment?

[billdeg]

CP/M 2.2e for TRS 80 Model II by Pickles and Trout

Made from parts from who knows how many Model II's, I assembled a working system that boots CP/M. Keyboard, screen, drives, external drive's drives all from donors. It's not that the Model II is a poor design or a cheap "Trash 80"...it's just that the original owners worked these things to death ... most Model II's saw 10 years of service before retirement and left forgotten on a warehouse shelf or at bottom of a heaps of equipment and papers...the best-known workhorse of the late 70's and into the mid 80's until finally replaced by IBM PC models.

What I'd really like to do is move a bunch of Model III software onto the II, anyone here have a best way? I suppose I could attach a serial port device and PIP files that way..I have never had a working Model II long enough to get into it.

 

[barythrin]

Cool! I never got mine fully working..well I take that back mine seemed to work fine but I never got it to run any software really... I guess I need to do a better cleaning on the drive. I think it scratched my only cp/m disk for it (track 0) although I had used a floppy drive cleaning disk a few times in it prior to anything it seemed like I almost needed to use it in between any use. After that I shelved it with the idea I needed to back up my disks but never did make the 8" to 5.25" converter thing to do so :-/

 

[Agent Orange]

Good for you Bill. That Model II was indeed a work horse. My old employer ran the thing for 2 shifts, Monday through Saturday, until our satellite plant finally closed, then moved it on to our home plate. There were no hardware failures per se, save for the felt pressure pads on the floppy disks. Our setup had 4 floppy's and didn't have a hard drive. All of our production programing was done in BASIC and we used a lot of Tandy off the shelf software packages. All backups were done manually to floppy's at the end of each shift. If you are not up to installing a Tandy hard drive (might be scarce), then maybe a Laplink type setup might work for you. IIRC, the parallel port worked pretty good. Good luck!

 

[Chromedome45]

Very cool Bill, Would like to get a hold of a Model 16B myself. In as far as I can tell I don't think there are many if any Model III titles that will run on a Model II. Might have to Run TRS-DOS on it. Check Dave Dunfields site I think he has a few Model II titles including TRS-DOS 2.0 I think. Anyway best of luck

 

[lowen]

Yes, I know it's an old thread....

You can run many Model 4 titles on the II with LS-DOS 6.3.1 for the II/12. Tim Mann has images on tim-mann.org; you'd just have to get them to a real floppy (easiest way is to replace the 8 inch drive with a 5.25 HD drive according to Frank Durda's instructions on nemesis.lonestar.org and use a Catweasel or similar to write the DMK to 5.25. Or you can drive an 8 inch drive with the Catweasel directly.

If I had a working model 12 or 16 I could make you copies of my original Misosys distribution disk, but I don't have a 12 or 16 any more.

[EDIT]
Here's a pic of the disk.....