27 Jan
2009
27 Jan
'09
8:14 p.m.
Hi, all,
I was cleaning up around the house and wanted to stash a Model 3 on
the shelf out of the way. Before I did, I fired it up to make sure it
(still) worked, and to try something I haven't tried before...
I have diskettes, c. 1982, from a friend lying around, so I booted it
into TRSDOS 1.3. All seems well. It claims to have 48K (internally
and according to the markings of the case and the memory report at
boot time), passes MEMTEST (which is on most/all of the TRSDOS disks),
it runs BASIC, and it starts a couple of binary games I found. What
it does not do is run Zork or Enchanter.
I have original Zork I and Enchanter disks. Booting up a backup of
the Zork disk gets me to a TRSDOS prompt. I can take a DIR and see
the program and the data file there. If I start Zork, the screen
blanks, the disk gronks and the access light blinks occasionally. I
hear what sounds like successive track seeks (which I'm expecting
since I know how Z-Machines work and roughly what virtual pages need
to be loaded to get a game started), but then after a few seconds
(less than 2 min), it sounds and looks like it's in a loop and repeats
the gronking and flashing. I never see anything on the screen except
for a blinking cursor. The Enchanter disk isn't much better - I think
it spins the disk and gronks for a bit, then goes quiet.
I'm posting because I am reasonably certain, due to age if nothing
else, that these are Model 1 diskettes. Enchanter is a flippy, with
As far as I rememebr, a Model 3 will not boot any Model 1 disk (or of
course vice versa). There have been disks that were made to boot on both
machines, by having a mixture of single and double density sectors on the
boot cylinder IIRC, but no nornmal OS will boot that way.
So the fact that the disks boot to a TRS-DOS prompt implies they're M3 disks.
I have Zork 1 for my Model 1. It was a self-booting disk, no TRS-DOS or
similar. And it was copy-protected (nothing that SuperUtility couldn't
manage :-)). So again, it sounds like you have a Model 3 version,
Since the system will boot other disks and run other programs, I susepct
either an unreadable sector on these games disks or something marginal in
the disk drive or disk controller.
Have you tried to make a ackup of Zork and/or Enchanter? If so, do the
backups behave inthe same way?
-tony