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Bit-banging a BASIC Birthday

banging a BASIC Birthday I spent this summer building a new app, for a machine that hasn’t been on the market since 1980 and wasn’t built to support graphics, sound, connectivity or even lowercase letters, sold by a company that went bankrupt a decade ago, tailor-made for an audience of one: my dad, who celebrated his 70th birthday this past Friday. Meet the MTS-70: The MTS-70 is designed for a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 (c.

I spent this summer building a new app, for a machine that hasn’t been on the market since 1980 and wasn’t built to support graphics, sound, connectivity or even lowercase letters, sold by a company that went bankrupt a decade ago, tailor-made for an audience of one: my dad, who celebrated his 70th birthday this past Friday. With my ‘A’ key working aganin, I had PlayCAS running through a Windows XP emulator using UTM on my M1 MacBook Air, sending cassette data through the computer’s headphone jack over a TRS-80 audio input cable. Inspired by the TRS-GPT example, I used a Python script on my Mac to do all the heavy lifting, and borrowed a lot of help from ChatGPT to construct and refine a BASIC program that would let me demo all the dad-specific functionality I wanted to include.

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