Tim Mann's TRS-80 Pages

 Business card from 1981



xtrs: TRS-80 Model I/III/4/4P Emulator for Unix


xtrs is a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I/III/4/4P emulator for Unix and the X Window System. It includes lower case, the real time clock, hi-res graphics, serial port, parallel printer, mouse, cassette, sound and music output (requires OSS), 5" and 8" floppy disk drives in single and double density, and even hard disk drives. The emulated floppy and hard disk file formats are compatible with the popular MSDOS-based emulators by Jeff Vavasour, Matthew Reed, and David Keil, and (if you choose a capable enough file format), all features of the original TRS-80 floppy disk controller are emulated. Under Linux, physical floppy disk drives are also supported. Physical cassettes can be read and written too. The user interface is a bit spartan, but it gets the job done.

Also check out sdltrs by Mark Grebe, and the updated version of sdltrs maintainted by Jens Guenther. It is a TRS-80 emulator for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows based on xtrs. All three versions of sdltrs have a text-based menu UI that makes it easier to insert/remove emulated floppy disks and tapes and to change other settings. The Mac version also has a nice native Mac GUI.

xtrs downloads and resources

If you are writing your own emulator, you are welcome to use my code, in whole or as a guideline. The copyright on the original xtrs code also permits such use. I would appreciate receiving a copy of any improvements you make to the code, however, so that we can release a better xtrs in the future when time permits.


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