TCS Trommeschläger Genie IIIs: Holte CP/M 3.0

This repository preserves and documents Thomas Holte's CP/M 3.0 system for the TCS Trommeschläger Genie IIIs — not to be confused with the plain Genie III, an earlier, unrelated machine manufactured by EACA (Hong Kong) that TCS merely distributed in Germany. Genie III (and EACA's COLOUR-GENIE) shipped with construction defects costly enough to fix that TCS designed its own improved successor in response, starting June 1983: the Genie IIIs (note the trailing "s"), built in Germany with Siemens producing the electronics and TCS doing final assembly. It's this TCS-built Genie IIIs, Z80-based and TRS-80-compatible, that this repo is about. The base machine was floppy-only — a Tandon 10 MB hard disk (via a Xebec SASI controller) was an optional add-on, not standard equipment, and so was a real-time clock (see history/01-format-only-winchester-support/ for the correction, and history/07-this-machine.md for the specific machine this whole collection traces back to). It sold only about 200 units, ever, and TCS itself went bankrupt in August 1985 — under two years after launch — as the market moved to the IBM PC. One of the last big CP/M machines, technically ahead of its time and too late anyway; see history/06-company-history.md for the full, sourced company history. That history is the whole scope of this repo: this is the Genie IIIs running Holte CP/M, nothing more. It's a source-code archive, not an emulator — see "Running it" below for that.

The hardware always had a hard disk; Holte's software support for it is a separate, longer story. A community of contributors (Peter Petersen, H. Bernhardt, Fritz Chwolka, Volker Dose, Egbert Schröer) built and rebuilt the CP/M hard-disk driver across 1987–1993 through Club 80, a computer club (long since gone) that this work circulated through — almost certainly long after TCS itself had stopped existing. history/ documents that whole software evolution — and, going further back, an independent restoration of Holte's original release by Jens Guenther — as real, buildable snapshots rather than just descriptions.

Running it

This repo is source code and disk images, not a runnable program by itself. To actually boot the Genie IIIs, you need an emulator:

• sdltrs, by Jens Guenther — the SDL2-based TRS-80 Model I/III/4/4P emulator this all runs on, and the reason any of this works cross-platform at all: it builds and runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS from one codebase. It emulates the Genie IIIs' Western Digital WD1000/1010 hard-disk controller.
• sdltrs-MultiHDC — a fork of sdltrs adding emulation of the other two hard-disk controllers this system supports: the OMTI 5527 SASI/MFM controller and the Xebec S1410 SASI controller (see src-omti/ and history/). This matters if you want to run any of the Seagate ST225/OMTI- or Xebec-based configurations documented in this repo — plain sdltrs can't drive those, only the WD1000/1010 path.
• SDLTRS-Wrapper ("TRS-80 Launcher") — a native macOS front-end wrapping sdltrs/sdltrs-MultiHDC in a proper Cocoa UI (machine presets, floppy and hard-disk slots, ROM/ config controls), for when the emulator's own menus aren't what you want. It's a launcher, not a separate emulator — Windows and Linux users can just run sdltrs/sdltrs-MultiHDC directly.

What's in this repo

• src/ — Thomas Holte's original CP/M 3.0 BIOS, BDOS-linkage, and utility sources (floppy + RAM disk only). Start with src/List of sys components.md for what each module does and how BOOTGEN.SUB/CPM3.SUB build a system.
• src-omti/ — the OMTI 5527/Seagate ST225 hard-disk BIOS additions, kept separate so the original Holte sources in src/ stay untouched. See src-omti/List of sys components.md. rom/g3s_hd-omti_bootrom_2764.bin (written by Arnolf Sopp) is the boot EPROM that lets the system boot directly from the hard disk with no floppy inserted.
• src-hitech-lib/ — Hi-Tech C library headers and the HOLTE.LIB graphics-library linker map, for writing your own C programs against this system's HRG (high-resolution graphics) hardware. See its own README.md; to actually get a working Hi-Tech C toolchain, see https://github.com/Egbert-Azure/Install-HITECH-C-COMPILER.
• history/ — every hard-disk BIOS lineage and independent restoration found across the wider disk collection, as real, buildable snapshots: Jens Guenther's independent restoration of Holte's original release, Holte's format-only Winchester support, Peter Petersen's 1987 driver and its divergent 1992/1993 branches, an undated Seagate ST251 4-partition experiment, and drive P:'s working alien-floppy-format mechanism (its exact configuration varies by snapshot). Start at history/README.md.
• rom/ — boot EPROM images.

There used to be a note here about UTILS//CPMSYS//LIBPLOT//LIBCZZZ// CLIBYYY/ subfolders under src/. Those never existed as folders in this repo — src/ is flat. LIBCZZZ, CLIBYYY, and CLIBXXX were Holte's own names for three small shared C libraries (now in src-hitech-lib/), not directories; LIBPLOT was likely an early name for the HOLTE.LIB graphics library documented there.

License

This repo's own material (documentation, tooling, organization) is MIT-licensed. The vendored Holte CP/M sources themselves carry their own original terms — see history/00-jens-guenther-holte-cpm-fork/README.md for the license Thomas Holte released them under.

Contributions and corrections are welcome — especially if you can identify any of the still-open questions in history/README.md's "What's not here yet" section, or have more disks from this era.