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Missile Defense

   I started my career on a TRS-80. This machine had a Z-80 CPU with whooping 48 kB of main memory. Nonetheless there existed many good programs, including early versions of arcade games. Back in 1983 I wrote my own game called Missile Defense. The screenshots to the left show the game in action. The artwork to the left was done by a high-school buddy of mine: Alfonso Manella. You can play this game today even though you (probably) don't have a real TRS-80 machine. This is achieved by running the game inside what is called an emulator. An emulator basically is a program that runs on a host computer (such as a PC or Mac) and 'emulates' the old TRS-80 hardware down to the last bit and byte.

In order to play Missile Defense, you first need to download a TRS-80 emulator for your system. Here are some popular emulators:

Note that these emulators do not contain ROM-images from the TRS-80 due to copyright reasons. The good news is that you don't need a ROM in order to play Missile Defense. Once you have installed the TRS-80 emulator, you need to download Missile Defense (defense.cmd). Most emulators allow you to execute a TRS-80 executable directly, without the need to boot first an operating system. This menu option is usually called "Load CMD", or "Execute CMD" in the "File" menu. Hint: the game tells you to press <Clear> to start the game. This key corresponds to <Home> on a standard PC-keyboard. If you are interested, you can also look at the disassembled version of Missile Defense (18.000 lines of code). Be sure to check out the only Windows game I ever wrote. Enjoy!

My TRS-80 Bookmarks:

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