Portable Adventures
Dec. 13th, 2025 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerHappening to think for the first time in a while of a TRS-80 Model 100 mailing list, I looked at its bookmarked web archive and saw some recent messages beginning with a question about “the Z-machine for the Model 100.” (That question had been inspired by news of some Infocom source code becoming “safe to distribute.”) As the discussion explained how someone had managed to get “the virtual machine that ran Infocom and later adventures” running on the portable with the aid of REX, a recent storage development for it, my amusement might have been tempered by reflecting on how I’d used the somewhat different (and more “volatile”) REXCPM to run the old Infocom interpreter for that operating system, but more to prove it could run than to play through games using it. That more people had their own chance to squeeze text adventures onto the Model 100’s small screen seemed good in itself, but perhaps thoughts of “paths not taken” left me wondering if I ought to at least try that other option myself.
I was able to get the game converter running, somehow amused by how the 32-kilobyte chunks it broke a game file into were meant to load into REX’s “ROM slots” as opposed to “RAM storage spaces.” With thoughts of testing it before loading it on my actual hardware, I resorted to the “Virtual T” emulator running on Linux; the emulator’s “external mass storage” option works for me there. Once the chunks were loaded, though, I ran into an error message. Looking back at the messages I saw someone else had faced the same error, which appears to involve the latest revision of REX’s firmware. At that point, I supposed I had to face how the somewhat less system-specific way of running the games I already had working did work.
To do something with my actual Model 100 I typed up a draft of this post on it, conscious its screen’s narrow slice of text showed fewer characters than the original Color Computer. I’d managed to get through Infocom’s adaptation of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” using it (after quite a few years and deciphering the almost faded-out clues from a friend’s old hint booklet), but had had the game pause in the middle of text blocks there. As I came to what seemed the end of the post, though, I did remember how I’d once tried to update the REX firmware Virtual T had supplied when setting up the storage option. I managed to load the firmware back into Virtual T, and saw it was the old version that ought to work. Then, asking myself “is the problem for me with the emulator and macOS loading files from external mass storage... or just saving them?”, I took a chance, and had the chunks manage to load while still using my regular computer. With that, I was able to get the game I’d converted running in emulation. This was a bit more of an accomplishment than I’d thought about reporting, if of course still a very small accomplishment.
I was able to get the game converter running, somehow amused by how the 32-kilobyte chunks it broke a game file into were meant to load into REX’s “ROM slots” as opposed to “RAM storage spaces.” With thoughts of testing it before loading it on my actual hardware, I resorted to the “Virtual T” emulator running on Linux; the emulator’s “external mass storage” option works for me there. Once the chunks were loaded, though, I ran into an error message. Looking back at the messages I saw someone else had faced the same error, which appears to involve the latest revision of REX’s firmware. At that point, I supposed I had to face how the somewhat less system-specific way of running the games I already had working did work.
To do something with my actual Model 100 I typed up a draft of this post on it, conscious its screen’s narrow slice of text showed fewer characters than the original Color Computer. I’d managed to get through Infocom’s adaptation of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” using it (after quite a few years and deciphering the almost faded-out clues from a friend’s old hint booklet), but had had the game pause in the middle of text blocks there. As I came to what seemed the end of the post, though, I did remember how I’d once tried to update the REX firmware Virtual T had supplied when setting up the storage option. I managed to load the firmware back into Virtual T, and saw it was the old version that ought to work. Then, asking myself “is the problem for me with the emulator and macOS loading files from external mass storage... or just saving them?”, I took a chance, and had the chunks manage to load while still using my regular computer. With that, I was able to get the game I’d converted running in emulation. This was a bit more of an accomplishment than I’d thought about reporting, if of course still a very small accomplishment.