If you want to skip ahead, and simply see the final, working project, then CLICK HERE
When I was a kid, around 1985, I got an Atari 800XL,
Atari 800XL, picture courtesy Wikipedia
It was the most joyous and addicting toy I had ever experienced, especially since it had games like Zork:
Zork II, picture courtesy www.atarimania.com
Thinking back, I often tell others that I greatly improved my reading and vocabulary skills while playing games such as Zork on a CRT television connected to the Atari computer.
As I played games, I became curious about how they were made, and I discovered the BASIC programming language.
example courtesy of https://www.youtube.com/@mmille10
Although only the basics of the language made sense to me, I got a kick out of painstakingly, manually typing in long programs that did cool things from my subscription to Antic Magazine:
My Antic magazine, 1986
But what I really wanted to write was an interactive program like Zork, but where I could chat with it, and it would be able to hold an intelligent conversation with me. In other words, it has always been my dream to have artificial general intelligence on my Atari. This goal was especially inspired by movies such as War Games:
War Games Movie - 1983
Fast forward about 40 years…
I’m now a middle-aged man with multiple degrees, working for NASA JPL. For all of these years, I’ve kept alive the childhood dream of interacting (chatting) with the computer in an intelligent way.
This year, 2023, two things happened, that allowed me to “close the loop” on my childhood dream:
- Something called ChatGPT became a thing
- Someone at work gave me a free TRS-80 Model III (built in 1981) computer
As a kid, I remember friends talking about the TRS-80, referring to it as the “trash 80”. So my expectations weren’t that high, but I realized that it looked pretty retro, had about the same resolution as my old Atari 800XL, and it ran BASIC!
When I opened the box, and fired it up (at least the thing powered on), I quickly realized that only about 10% of the keys actually worked.
I proceeded to take apart the computer, and one-by-one de-soldered each key, disassembled the mechanisms in each one, cleaned the contacts, put the key back together, and soldered the whole keyboard back together. Thanks to this great video, I was really about to understand the process of keyboard restoration.
The TRS-80, opened up
a top-down view of the keyboard
disassembling the keyboard
keys off
cleaning a key
close-up view of a key contact
soldering the keyboard back together
After this, I had a working, beautiful TRS-80, with fully-functional keys!
shiny, brand-new, restored TRS-80 Model III!
Then I realized that I didn’t even have a hard drive to store BASIC programs (or anything) on. Should I track down and buy a TRS-80 floppy drive from someone on Ebay? No, this is 2023, and I wanted to follow a more modern approach! I did some searches online, and found Ian Mavric, the “Australian TRS-80 Recycler”, and figured out I could get a FreHD module, which essentially allows one to plug an external board with a microSD card, into the serial ribbon cable input on the back of the TRS-80, which would emulate a hard drive. Ian was selling the the “FreHD Clearly Superior Kit for M3/4”, which supposedly worked for my needs. It was “clearly superior”, so it had to be the right choice for me. I ordered the kit, and set it up, which also involved replacing a certain ROM chip.
FreHD Clearly Superior Kit for M3/4!
Ian was reall
