I have a TRS-80 Model I with 48K, a Radio Shack lowercase mod, RS cassette mod and RS Double Density board. The EI is the last model with no buffered cable or pigtail cable. With the EI on but machine started with Break held down (Level II Basic)
cassettes are read just fine. When I boot up in either TRSDOS 2.3 or TRSDOS 2.8D, cassettes either show no asterisks or two solid asterisks depending on the volume setting of the recorder. I can never adjust the volume so cassettes are read. I do have
the RTC turned off with CMD"T" and have printed TIME$ a few times to verify the RTC is not incrementing the time. I have tried connecting the recorder through the EI and directly to the keyboard. No difference.

Can anyone suggest what to do from here? I'd really like to copy my many tapes to floppies!

TIA

Tom Lake

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Are you trying to load BASIC or ML (machine language) tapes? If the latter, the tape loading may be overwriting DOS in low memory, locking the machine. If ML, try using the TAPE command

TAPE (s=source, d=destination)

T=tape
D=disk
R=RAM

TAPE (s=t,d=d)
Will load the tape and save to disk. File name is read off the tape, and /CMD is appended when written to disk.

BASIC programs should use CLOAD and CSAVE, as in Level II BASIC.

Hope this helps

Larry

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These instructions from TRSDOS DD manual, p. 69

On Tuesday, October 18, 2016 at 9:54:12 AM UTC-5, laf...@gmail.com wrote:

Are you trying to load BASIC or ML (machine language) tapes? If the latter, the tape loading may be overwriting DOS in low memory, locking the machine. If ML, try using the TAPE command

TAPE (s=source, d=destination)

T=tape
D=disk
R=RAM

TAPE (s=t,d=d)
Will load the tape and save to disk. File name is read off the tape, and /CMD is appended when written to disk.

BASIC programs should use CLOAD and CSAVE, as in Level II BASIC.

Hope this helps

Larry

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Tom,
You asked a question that I thought was a bit more involved. If you are trying to load were designed for a Level II machine, they will want to load in memory used by DOS. The TRSDOS 2.8D utility won't work for these programs. Take a look at a program
called LMOFFSET which first appeared in NewDOS+ and was continued to later versions. This program will load a tape into memory above DOS, report start, end, and entry points, and create a short program appendage to relocate the program to its original
addresses after loading from disk. Of course, this means that you have to reboot when you are finished with the program.

If you need documentation or DOS copy, let me know.

Larry

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On Tuesday, October 18, 2016 at 10:54:12 AM UTC-4, laf...@gmail.com wrote:

Are you trying to load BASIC or ML (machine language) tapes? If the latter, the tape loading may be overwriting DOS in low memory, locking the machine. If ML, try using the TAPE command

TAPE (s=source, d=destination)

T=tape
D=disk
R=RAM

TAPE (s=t,d=d)
Will load the tape and save to disk. File name is read off the tape, and /CMD is appended when written to disk.

BASIC programs should use CLOAD and CSAVE, as in Level II BASIC.

Hope this helps

Larry

Mea Culpa. I should have been more specific. I can't even load BASIC tapes made with the same recorder. These tapes load fine in Level II whether the EI is on or off but won't load in Disk BASIC even when the RTC is stopped.

Tom L

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On Thursday, October 20, 2016 at 10:13:07 AM UTC-7, Thomas Lake wrote:

Mea Culpa. I should have been more specific. I can't even load BASIC tapes made with the same recorder. These tapes load fine in Level II whether the EI is on or off but won't load in Disk BASIC even when the RTC is stopped.

There's less free memory available in Disk BASIC, but seems unlikely these BASIC programs are so big that it would matter.

It is loading into different RAM so maybe a RAM test is in order? Still, can't see how that would cause a failure to load. That is, even if there were bad RAM I'd think the program would load OK but wouldn't run properly.

Maybe there's some other device driver causing problems?

Only other thing I can think of is power problems. But presumably the load that works with the EI attached still has the disk drive attached so things should be different.

Perhaps it would be easiest to avoid the problem by using Knut's wav2cas program to copy the files onto a PC and then go by some other route to get the files from the PC to the floppies.

wav2cas: http://knut.one/wav2cas.htm

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Thomas Lake wrote:

Mea Culpa. I should have been more specific. I can't even load BASIC tapes made with the same recorder. These tapes load fine in Level II whether the
EI is on or off but won't load in Disk BASIC even when the RTC is stopped.

Does your Disk BASIC load/save in both tokenised and ASCII modes?


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On Sunday, October 23, 2016 at 5:21:38 PM UTC-4, golem wrote:

Thomas Lake wrote:

Mea Culpa. I should have been more specific. I can't even load BASIC tapes made with the same recorder. These tapes load fine in Level II whether the EI is on or off but won't load in Disk BASIC even when the RTC is stopped.

Does your Disk BASIC load/save in both tokenised and ASCII modes?

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TRSDOS Disk BASIC is just disk extensions to the Level II BASIC that's in ROM so, yes, it should load both.

Tom L

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