I must confess that my Google-Fu is weak and puny.
I started digging around further this evening, and in short order located a couple of Model III emulators written in JavaScript. They all appear derived from work by Peter Phillips and his twin brother. Here are some of the sites which offer it, along with some "click 2 load" images of the classic games on the system.
The code for the emulator itself is even released under the GPL, which is wonderful. HOWEVER there are 2 major problems:
(1) I'm extremely uneasy as to the legality of the ROM images which are included in the JavaScript code. Everything I can find indicates that those are still held by Tandy/Microsoft. They haven't done anything about the hobbyist community floating these old ROMs around... yet. But...
(2) Aside from typing in the whole program from scratch, there is no good way to get Retro-ZAP! into the emulator. I downloaded the JavaScript file & crafted a basic HTML webpage... and sure enough, I can get the thing to run on Chrome from my local drive. But the fundamental problem is that the bloody thing requires AJAX to load program images into the emulation--which means setting up and running the whole server-side mess to support it. I am not about to fool with that kind of a headache, since I already have the actual machine and native-code emulators.
Thus, I'm at a crossroads and would like some input or suggestions here...
(1) Would this be something that Armchair Arcade would like to host on the games page? (I'm guessing that to be "HELL NO." given the legal grey area concerning the included ROMs.)
(2) DoDOES anyone think it's genuinely worth attempting to contact one of these sites and get them to add Retro-ZAP! to their site?
(3) Something I'm not thinking of?
Just musing out loud here, hoping to get more input.
I must confess that my Google-Fu is weak and puny.
I started digging around further this evening, and in short order located a couple of Model III emulators written in JavaScript. They all appear derived from work by Peter Phillips and his twin brother. Here are some of the sites which offer it, along with some "click 2 load" images of the classic games on the system.
http://people.cs.ubc.ca/~pphillip/trs80.html
http://jtandy.antoniovillena.es/
http://animalscience.tamu.edu/ansc/tedeschi/trs80/trs80.html
The code for the emulator itself is even released under the GPL, which is wonderful. HOWEVER there are 2 major problems:
(1) I'm extremely uneasy as to the legality of the ROM images which are included in the JavaScript code. Everything I can find indicates that those are still held by Tandy/Microsoft. They haven't done anything about the hobbyist community floating these old ROMs around... yet. But...
(2) Aside from typing in the whole program from scratch, there is no good way to get Retro-ZAP! into the emulator. I downloaded the JavaScript file & crafted a basic HTML webpage... and sure enough, I can get the thing to run on Chrome from my local drive. But the fundamental problem is that the bloody thing requires AJAX to load program images into the emulation--which means setting up and running the whole server-side mess to support it. I am not about to fool with that kind of a headache, since I already have the actual machine and native-code emulators.
Thus, I'm at a crossroads and would like some input or suggestions here...
(1) Would this be something that Armchair Arcade would like to host on the games page? (I'm guessing that to be "HELL NO." given the legal grey area concerning the included ROMs.)
(2)
DoDOES anyone think it's genuinely worth attempting to contact one of these sites and get them to add Retro-ZAP! to their site?(3) Something I'm not thinking of?
Just musing out loud here, hoping to get more input.
-Shawn