Josh Sucher Surprises His Dad with a Restored TRS-80 — Delivering LLM Chats, Video games, and Extra

Maker Josh Sucher shocked his father on the seventieth anniversary of his beginning with a challenge straight out of the late Nineteen Seventies: the restoration of a Tandy-Radio Shack TRS-80 Mannequin I to host a custom-built app able to every little thing from enjoying Blissful Birthday to holding a big language model-powered dialog.

“I spent this summer season 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, offered 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 challenge 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 not too long ago 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 have fun his father’s birthday — although the state of the {hardware} practically did.

“Rising up, my dad at all times spoke reverently about his TRS-80. It was his first pc, when he first opened his legislation workplace,” Sucher remembers. “So this spring, with my thoughts on turning outdated electrical typewriter components into USB keyboards (I had a whole lot of spare components available), I grabbed a TRS-80 off of eBay to play with.”

The machine was offered as-is, and took somewhat restoration: the keyboard required restore, Sucher constructed a {custom} energy provide, recapped and identified varied faults with the machine itself and its CRT monitor, and a scarcity of cassette deck meant a connection to a close-by Apple Mac to load software program via the machine’s audio enter. The subsequent step was overcoming the machine’s limitations — primarily via the addition of a TRS-IO board, which expands the machine to incorporate 32kB of further 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 guide 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 recreation of Go, although this — together with the remainder of the app’s extra superior options — “cheats” by offloading the exhausting work to a extra trendy machine working the gnugo engine.

In one other bridge between the Nineteen Seventies and the 2020s, the app can also be able to enjoying an interactive fiction recreation, 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 instructed to emulate their fashion. In each instances, queries are despatched to the OpenAI software programming interface (API) — the fashions being somewhat too giant to squeeze into the TRS-80’s 48kB most expanded RAM for native use.

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 information. Climate occasion comes from NOAA and NWS sources, from designated native climate stations, concatenated and despatched over the TCP/IP socket.

“Should you’re curious how the MTS-70 was obtained, I can report that it was big hit out East throughout our birthday weekend. Provided that this challenge 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 challenge is documented in full on Sucher’s web site, with the challenge supply code printed to GitHub below an unspecified license.