2nd Life is a complete TRS-80 Model III emulator for Atari ST, STE, TT, Falcon or compatible computers. It can be used to run most TRS-80 Model I and III programs.

It emulates the Z-80 microprocessor, video subsystem, keyboard, cassette relay, printer port, internal clock, floppy disk controller and four 80-track single sided disk drives. The emulation code is written completely in assembler, and as a result the emulated computer runs on a 16 MHz 68000 (STE) virtually as fast as the original machine. But even on an 8 Mhz ST the perceived speed is close to that of the original machine, as the emulator optimizes key ROM subroutines (I developed it on an 8 Mhz ST, so I know).

Test results from the included SPEED.BAS application which compares the speed to an original 2 Mhz Model III are:

The Floating Point test is a good indicator of the CPU emulation speed. The perceived speed is much better though because of the video and ROM subroutine acceleration feature.

The GEM shell is written in C and includes a font editor, keyboard layout editor, disassembler, debugger, memory dump and virtual diskdrives as icons in a window. It also offers a snapshot feature. The emulator even has joystick support (emulating TRS-80 spacebar and arrow key presses).

Besides the emulator, the package includes applications to convert disk images and transfer files between a TRS-80 and Atari ST through their parallel ports, as well as several virtual disks with TRS-80 software, a complete manual and additional documentation.

Reviews

• Atari Times
• ATOS Magazine (German)
• ST Computer (German)
• XIO3 (PDF)

Interesting Sites

• TRS-80 on Wikipedia
• Atari ST on Wikipedia
• Software based 128x192 graphics on a real Model III
• TRS-80 details
• TRS-80 details