Maker Josh Sucher stunned his father on the seventieth anniversary of his delivery with a mission straight out of the late Seventies: the restoration of a Tandy-Radio Shack TRS-80 Mannequin I to host a custom-built app able to all the things from enjoying Blissful Birthday to holding a big language model-powered dialog.
“I spent this summer time constructing a brand new app, for a machine that hasn’t been available on the market since 1980 and wasn’t constructed to assist graphics, sound, connectivity and even lowercase letters, bought by an organization that went bankrupt a decade in the past, tailored for an viewers of 1: my dad, who celebrated his seventieth birthday this previous Friday,” Sucher explains. “Meet the MTS-70.”
The center of the mission is a TRS-80 Mannequin I, an eight-bit microcomputer launched in 1977 and discontinued in 1981. Powered by a 1.774MHz Zilog Z80 — solely just lately discontinued, to the consternation of its followers — and with 4kB of RAM expandable to a beneficiant 48kB, the micro drive a bundled 12″ CRT in a 64×16 character “semigraphics” mode. This limitation wouldn’t cease Sucher’s plans for a six-feature mega-app designed to rejoice his father’s birthday — although the state of the {hardware} almost did.
“Rising up, my dad at all times spoke reverently about his TRS-80. It was his first pc, when he first opened his regulation workplace,” Sucher recollects. “So this spring, with my thoughts on turning previous electrical typewriter elements into USB keyboards (I had a variety of spare elements readily available), I grabbed a TRS-80 off of eBay to play with.”
The TRS-80 lives a brand new life as a terminal for video games, an LLM-powered textual content journey, and “Dadbot”. (📷: Josh Sucher)
The machine was bought as-is, and took a bit of restoration: the keyboard required restore, Sucher constructed a {custom} energy provide, recapped and identified numerous faults with the machine itself and its CRT monitor, and an absence of cassette deck meant a connection to a close-by Apple Mac to load software program via the machine’s audio enter. The following step was overcoming the machine’s limitations — primarily via the addition of a TRS-IO board, which expands the machine to incorporate 32kB of extra RAM and an Espressif ESP32-powered Wi-Fi modem.
That is key to the meat of the current: a six-application {custom} software program bundle, impressed by a e-book on “grownup pc video games in BASIC.” The primary of those is straightforward sufficient: enjoying Blissful Birthday, utilizing the output usually used for recording to tape however on this case related to an exterior speaker. One other is to play a sport of Go, although this — together with the remainder of the app’s extra superior options — “cheats” by offloading the onerous work to a extra fashionable machine operating the gnugo engine.
In one other bridge between the Seventies and the 2020s, the app can also be able to enjoying an interactive fiction sport, which makes use of OpenAI’s GPT-4 giant language mannequin to answer directions — whereas the sooner GPT-3.5 mannequin is fed a decade of textual content messages between the elder and youthful Suchers and advised to emulate their model. In each instances, queries are despatched to the OpenAI software programming interface (API) — the fashions being a bit of too giant to squeeze into the TRS-80’s 48kB most expanded RAM for native use.
The textual content journey is fed with details about the household, to personalize the generated textual content. (📷: Josh Sucher)
The mannequin can also be used to nice impact to offer marine forecast and live performance information. “For these,” Sucher explains, “I merely have my Python server script pull in native knowledge. Climate occasion comes from NOAA and NWS sources, from designated native climate stations, concatenated and despatched over the TCP/IP socket.
“When you’re curious how the MTS-70 was acquired, I can report that it was enormous hit out East throughout our birthday weekend. Provided that this mission emerged from borrowed nostalgia in regards to the TRS-80, it was fascinating to see the bounds of my dad’s personal reverence for this historic tech.”
The mission is documented in full on Sucher’s web site, with the mission supply code revealed to GitHub underneath an unspecified license.
