On the TRS-80 mailing list I subscribe there was a discussion about an old (from 1977!) game I used to play on my TRS-80 Model I called Space Warp. This game was originally called “Time Trek”, based on the popular television series Star Trek. When Tandy/Radio Shack released this game commercially, they changed some of the terms, probably for copyright reasons.

Someone mentioned that it had been ported to X and that the sources were available. But, when I downloaded the sources from x.org and tried to build it, I noticed that this port was from 1995 and many things have changed since then… It simply threw tons of errors instead of building the program. For sentimental reasons I did not give up though, and decided to try to solve the incompatibilities with the modern Gnu C++ compiler.

What needed to be adapted

Some of the needed changes were quite obvious, others required a bit of “Googling” to discover. All in all, it was a nice exercise for me. The major items were:

• #include <iostream.h> – Modern versions of gcc expect #include <iostream> and a line defining the namespace (”using namespace std“)
• string literals needed to be defined as (char*) like: invalid((char*)"columns"); instead of invalid("columns");

Other changes were less obvious, but all in all I had to create a patch file of 999 lines

After all these patches, XSpaceWarp built fine on Slackware 13.0 and the 13.1 beta, both 32 & 64-bits. I also tested it on ARMedslack.

The result

Here are two screenshots from the game:

It’s not exactly a graphic-intensive game, but don’t forget that this was written over thirty years ago

Get it!

If you use Slackware, you can get packages from Slackware 13.0 32 & 64-bits and for ARMedslack from my site.
As soon as SlackBuilds.org opens for submissions again (after the release of Slackware 13.1), I’ll submit the SlackBuild.

If you want to build the program yourself, get the original sources from x.org or the patched version for newer compilers here.
The patch is also separately available here, so that you can study it and patch your own sources.

Packages for Slackware 13.0 are available on my site:

• sdltrs-1_0_0-i486-2_nhh.tgz (32-bits)
• sdltrs-1_0_0-x86_64-2_nhh.tgz (64-bits)

As always, have fun!

Since my desktop runs Slackware Linux, the emulator I use is xtrs. It is small, fast and emulates the Model I, III, 4 and 4p. I have had all these models and still have a Model 4p in reasonable condition.

As every good Linux program, xtrs is distributed as open source, for the end-user to compile.
This has never been a problem to me, but not every TRS-80 fan might be happy about this.

So, after the newest release of xtrs in June, I put on my to-do list to make a ‘Slackware-package’, so that at least Slackware users can run xtrs installing a simple package without any compiling.
Since my to-do list is quite extensive, it took some time for this task to arrive at the top, but today I finally managed to get it done.

The result is available on my homepage, in two versions:

• xtrs-4.9d-i486-2_nhh.tgz, the 32-bit version
• xtrs-4.9d-x86_64-2_nhh.tgz, the 64-bit version (for Slackware64)

Both have been tested with Slackware 13.0 but should work fine on 12.x as well, and probably some older versions.

For those who prefer to compile their own software, I submitted a SlackBuild to SlackBuilds.org but it is pending for approval at the moment.

Here is a screenshot of xtrs emulating a Model III running NEWDOS/80:

And this is the Model I running the famous Dancing Demon: