@folly said in Has anyone managed to get sound from the TRS-80?:

@jimmyfromthebay

I found this info on a blog :

Many games did not include sound effects, as audio output was not an intentional feature of the TRS-80's design, but many games used a trick to produce sound effects.

The trick was :
Back in the day, we had to hook a little speaker up to the cassette out line to pick up the audio

So that could be the reason why you don't have sound.

No, these are definitely games with programmed sound and speech, because I've seen YouTube videos of them (and MESS does refer to the machine's sound hardware, as seen in the above pics). It's very strange that the maximum sound output level in MESS is set to 0dB.

I've no idea what the technical machine differences are. There were a whole bunch of systems around at the same time that appear to use extremely similar hardware/OSes, and run identical-looking ports of the same games (I think the Genie is another) but I don't think they're compatible.

I'll investigate adding memory. It was a massive faff to get games working across all three formats, and lots of stuff that seemed like it SHOULD work didn't work because the files were in some sort of different formats despite having the same file extension. If I can get sound working I'll do a little tutorial.

(Planning one for the Dragon 32/CoCo2 as well, but so many things to do and so little time. Currently having an absolutely brutal fistfight with a couple of incomprehensible ZX Spectrum Next emulators.)

SDLTRS - System command does not work!