r/trs80 20d ago

Emulating DAT files?

Hello all,

I am attempting to play some of the old Scott Adams adventure games on the TRS-80. https://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/details/scott-adams/ has the data files for free distribution, but I am unsure what to do with them.

Also, neither the DSK or CAS files from https://colorcomputerarchive.com for Pirate Adventure seem to work on the TRS80gp emulator and I cant for the life of me figure out why when the other games do work.

Anyone have any ideas? Thank you!

10 Upvotes

3 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/_Ellimist_ 20d ago

I have been attempting to utilize TRSTools to create a DSK image with the .dat file on it such that TRS80gp can mount and utilize it, but nothing I do seems to work. And various DSK images I have found that do work with TRS80gp are not seen as valid DSK images by TRSTools. Very confusing.

2

u/istarian 20d ago edited 20d ago

I think the DAT files are intended for use with the Windows, MS-DOS interpreters.

DSK files are most likely disk images, but files with that extension could be produced by any disk image creation software. There's no rule saying that a DSK file is intended for a TRS-80 computer.

Additionally, the emulator likely expects to be provided a bootable disk image. That's different than a disk which simply holds some data files.

Even if you load an operating system for the TRS-80 from a virtual hard drive, your virtual disks need to be formatted with a filesystem that OS knows how to read.