i'm happy to report that someone had already digitized the Fantasy Gamer's package a few years ago! you can play it online here and generate your own little dungeons. the room generator is pretty cute:
what was missing, however, was the 40+ pages of print documentation that came in the mail-order ziplock, and a pic of the cassette tape. i've scanned them all here, along with a new recording of the cassette:
one of those fascinating things learned only by manual archival of materials:
Prickly-Pear Software recorded two exact copies of the program on a single 5-minute tape. the idea, i imagine, was to provide a second identical copy in case the tape became physically damaged (or mis-recorded during fabrication)
i have fallen in love with the mail order/ziplock bag era of software publishing. this piece is 42 years old, and came from a TRS-80 owner that I inherited it (and dozens of other software/hardware from) fifteen years ago
the original owner of Dunkey Munkey for the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer ordered it from a home business called Intellitronics, based out of Smithtown, NY, USA.
play as luigi 😎
what stands out to me is the cover art. this would have been created using a font stencil and paper cut-outs, hand-placed and then duplicated with a four-colour printing press process. i'd love to know if anyone into printing recognizes the technique/machinery that might have been used to duplicate it.
more hilariously good TRS-80 software from the archive
Bedlam puts you in the role of a patient in a mental facility whose only goal is to escape
having worked in a psychiatric hospital in a previous life, i can confirm that (a) this is a rather uncharitable view of hospitals and their patients, and (b) 🤣
the answer/interpretive key for the mental health exam: classic!
i'm finally opening up boxes of software from my archive that haven't seen the light of day in 15-20 years. today, i found a program that has never been archived or probably seen in over 40 years.
i absolutely adore this dungeon mastering program for the TRS-80 that was distributed in ziplock bags in 1982
i can find only one mention of it on the web - the august 1982 issue of TRS-80 Rainbow magazine that advertises it for $19.95 + S&H
happily, i found the cassette, which has never been archived anywhere AFAIK. i am scanning in the printed documentation, along with making a recording of the tape.
before these all go to ebay, are there any TRS-80 enthusiasts who want a massive collection of Radio Shack/Tandy Rainbow magazines, from 1984-1990?
will pass them on for a fraction of the ebay price. shipping from canada will be uncheap, but far less than shipping individual issues. would like to see this go to someone in the retrocomputing/archival community!
update: thanks to @shawn6809 the entire collection is now spoken for! :)
The Tandy Portable Computer 100, was a pioneering portable computer released in 1983 by RadioShack, part of Tandy Corporation. It featured an integrated keyboard, a built-in LCD screen, and ran on four AA batteries, making it highly portable for its time. 📠💻
Sharp's innovative pocket PCs ran on BASIC, allowing users to write programs, load from tapes, and even check email. They connected to phones, enabling journalists to read email from payphones. Equipped with serial ports, they facilitated data transfer with printers and computers, and some even had built-in printers! 🖨️
thanks to an excellent writeup on the ibm pcjr by ancientelectronics, TIL the jr has an easy $10 mod to make the graphics chipset Tandy 1000-compatible!
In the early 80s, you could buy a text to speech hardware module (around $200-300) for your computer, or you could buy a software only solution. The S.A.M. cost $59.95 for the software. There was a version for Apple II that also included an 8 bit DAC card, for $124.95 total. This was sold by Don't Ask Computer Software and advertised here in Antic magazine, a special edition on sound and music from October 1982.
But, you may ask, what is a System 80 computer? It was a Radio Shack TRS80 model I compatible computer. It was much cheaper than the US import. Here is a mk II version in the Dick Smith 1983 catalog.
Here's a collection of Tandy appearances. There's a TRS-80 Model I in "The New Adventures of Heidi", a TRS-80 Model III in "A Million Miles Away" and a few more Model IIIs in "White Noise" (along with a brief glimpse of an Apple II).
My Retro-Computer Journey - let's start with my Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P. I got this given to me by an older fellow who was getting rid of all his stuff. It had the MOS 6502 processor in it and I kept it for several years but really didn't do much with it. I wound up donating it to a computer museum in the end. Interesting machine for sure!
My Retro-Computing Journey - this is the only micro computer that I ever owned... the Tandy TRS-80 MC-10. It was adorable! I had a tiny cassette recorder with it, and even a tiny memory expansion module. I wound up giving to a friend as he had one of these as a little kid, and I figured he'd appreciate it more than I did.
XRoar, version 1.5.4 (www.6809.org.uk)
XRoar: Dragon 32, Dragon 64, Dragon 200-E, Tandy Colour Computer and Tandy MC-10 emulator for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and Windows.