Trash 80 vs Amiga

[Pyromania]

I’ll have to admit I never owned a Trash 80. I jumped right from the C64 to the Amiga 500. I was wondering g though was there any area where the Trash 80 beat the Amiga?

[BippyM]

Are you talking about the musician or a trs-80?

[Pyromania]

TRS-80, I don’t think the musician your talking about which I know nothing about is a computer.

[Weaselrama]

The TRS-80 was based on the Z-80, a clone of the Intel 8080 and was an 8-bit computer. It featured black and white graphics and had an onboard basic compiler. Floppy drives (the big ones) could be added to it.

I played a few games on the TRS-80. They were silly and awful at the same time. The TRS-80 couldn't even compare in any meaningful way to the Apple II or the C64. So comparing it to the Amiga is probably the worst-case scenario of comparing apples to dump trucks.

[Weaselrama]

Radio Shack came out with better machines than the TRS-80 which probably compared favorably with a machine like the IMSAI 8080, the computer featured in the film WAR GAMES. That film really drummed up sales of the IMSAI 8080. Unfortunately, the same year, COMPAQ introduced their first PC-clone/MS-DOS compatible (more or less) computer and IMSAI went out of business - quickly. The TANDY 1000 was a near-PC compatible machine and sold extremely well.

[dreadnought]

Jeez, TRS-80 was released in 1977 discontinued at 1981. How on Earth can it compare with C64 or Amiga?

Sure, Apple 2 was better but also twice the price. The games were neither silly nor awful, at least not all of them. Overall, alongside PET and AII it was a pioneering machine and I could never figure out why it got that moniker and all the bad rap (I know about its flaws and faults but come on, it was ninteen seventy friggin seven!).

I guess tribal wars were a thing back then too.

[mc6809e]

There was the TRS-80 color computer. It had an MC6809E microprocessor.

The 6809 was interesting in that it was sort of an 8bit/16-bit processor. It was a bit like the 68000. The arch looked 16-bit, but it had an 8-bit bus and alu in the same way the 68000 has a 32-bit registers but a 16-bit alu and bus.

It had two stack pointers -- a system stack pointer and a user stack pointer and supported PC-relative addressing allowing it to run position independent and reentrant code. There was even a multitasking OS for the color computer that used these features called OS-9. Someone even came up with a windowing system for it (only text).

The CPU supported a fast interrupt which pushed only the minimum necessary onto the stack.

It even had a MUL instruction which was a little unusal at the time.

It wasn't well optimized, though. Too often the bus was idle.

[stevsurv]

Originally Posted by mc6809e

There was the TRS-80 color computer. It had an MC6809E microprocessor.

This looks interesting. Heres more info -


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer

[Pyromania]

@stevsurv

That’s the one I was thinking of.

[aeberbach]

early TRS-80 computers had a nicer keyboard, but that's all. With the CoCo models their keyboards got to be about the same.

[Minuous]

It was a decent machine for its time, with a large base of mostly good software. Some of my favourite games for it are listed at http://amigan.1emu.net/trs-80/ and they are just as much fun now as then.

Obviously no match for an Amiga by any measurement of specifications. But the fact that it can be emulated even on quite a low-spec Amiga is an advantage. Even a simple frame-based emulation is sufficient, compared to raster-based or cycle-exact emulation, which is required for some other machines of the time (eg. Atari VCS or Interton VC 4000).

[RedskullDC]

Hi Pyro, et al.

Originally Posted by Pyromania

I was wondering though was there any area where the Trash 80 beat the Amiga?

About the only area where the early machines win is ease of use for beginners.
You can knock out a small program on a TRS-80 (Z80 or CoCo) within an hour from knowing nothing.

The Amiga is orders of magnitude more advanced. A steeper learning curve, but so much more is possible.

I know, there was AmigaBASIC with the 1000, but it soon fell by the wayside when people got their heads around C etc.

CoCo still has a solid following, with new hardware/software still being developed.
Still have my Coco3 with 2MB expansion board

Cheers,
Red

[hiho]

One area TRS-80 beat out Amiga was the number of different disk operating systems from third party vendors.

[drHirudo]

The TRS-80 was good for it's times. Think about late 1970/early 1980s (if you remember these time), where computers didn't need GUI or graphics to function. The TRS was pretty useful for business task and even games.
There was even very good Donkey Kong port for it:
[ Show youtube player ]

Along with Space Defender, Zaxxon, Armored Patrol, Sea Dragon, Rear Guard and many other arcade ports, Interactive Fictions adventure and other.

Compared to the Amiga it is not comparable, because there are different generations machines. Compared to other 8-bit machines, it is one of the crappiest, with the lowest specs, but on the other hand the low entry level for it made it wide available, and there is a huge software titles library for it.

[hiho]

For small business, a Model 1/III or IV was a great tool at a good price.

[AmigaHope]

When talking about a "TRS-80", you really have to specify what model you're talking about, because Tandy essentially labeled *EVERY* computer they sold as a "TRS-80", regardless of compatibility or architecture. Down to the TRS-80 Pocket Computer which was basically a glorified programmable calculator.

They even released the TRS-80 Model 2000 which was a bizarre 80186-based MS-DOS computer that was advertised as IBM Compatible, but wasn't (hardware was super different, it could only run some textmode MS-DOS software). This was *NOT* compatible with the actually IBM Compatible non-TRS-80-branded Tandy 1000 and Tandy 3000 systems.

At least 8 different incompatible architectures were released under the TRS-80 name. Though the ones most people are familiar with are the lines of the TRS-80 Model 1, 3, and 4 -- and the TRS-80 CoCo 1, 2, and 3. They couldn't even get that naming scheme right as the TRS-80 model 2 wasn't even compatible with the 1, 3, and 4, and instead got its own line of compatible models like the model 12 and 16.

Not even Commodore was that messed up in terms of confusing branding of incompatible systems.

[dreadnought]

Speaking of 1977 Trinity, my mouse's cursor is being mysteriously drawn to an ongoing local PET auction. Must...try...resist! arrrgh!

[ma693541]

I remember when I was at high-school we had Apple-II computers in the class for education and fun. One day we all in the class was gathered around an A2000 showing the picture of the famous pharaoh we all know so well. There and then I decided to get one Amiga even if I had to pay a small fortune for it.

[Weaselrama]

The one thing I remember about the cassette drive-based TRS-80 we bought where I worked in 1979 to build a Basic-written pricing program, was the "keyboard debounce" routine we had to run every few days to keep the keyboard from typing double and triple sets of characters. Ours was the original TRS-80 which sold for $999.99. Entry-level price if you figure that every spec'd out computer, no matter which year it was built from the beginning of the microcomputer era, was and has been, $2,000.00.

[hiho]

The least mentioned models are the Model II and the Model 16.


I remember being amazed at the idea of having multiple terminals with access to the same data.


Once the "planned" Model V died, my interest in the brand died with it.


If you were going to buy a PC clone, buying the lowest priced clone made the most sense. "Lowest Price" was never used to describe Radio Shack.


For a few years, Radio Shack was somebody. Then the dream faded and died. Not that much different I suppose than Commodore.

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

When talking about a "TRS-80", you really have to specify what model you're talking about, because Tandy essentially labeled *EVERY* computer they sold as a "TRS-80", regardless of compatibility or architecture. Down to the TRS-80 Pocket Computer which was basically a glorified programmable calculator.

They even released the TRS-80 Model 2000 which was a bizarre 80186-based MS-DOS computer that was advertised as IBM Compatible, but wasn't (hardware was super different, it could only run some textmode MS-DOS software). This was *NOT* compatible with the actually IBM Compatible non-TRS-80-branded Tandy 1000 and Tandy 3000 systems.

At least 8 different incompatible architectures were released under the TRS-80 name. Though the ones most people are familiar with are the lines of the TRS-80 Model 1, 3, and 4 -- and the TRS-80 CoCo 1, 2, and 3. They couldn't even get that naming scheme right as the TRS-80 model 2 wasn't even compatible with the 1, 3, and 4, and instead got its own line of compatible models like the model 12 and 16.

Not even Commodore was that messed up in terms of confusing branding of incompatible systems.