[HN Gopher] A collection of modern games for the TI-99/4A
___________________________________________________________________
A collection of modern games for the TI-99/4A
Author : wsc981
Score : 124 points
Date : 2021-09-18 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tigameshelf.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (tigameshelf.net)
| donio wrote:
| The source code for the Jetpac clone written in Forth is
| available here:
|
| https://atariage.com/forums/topic/241846-new-game-project-je...
|
| https://atariage.com/forums/applications/core/interface/file...
| compsciphd wrote:
| if I remember correctly, TI had a forth development environment
| for the 99/4a (TI-Forth).
| abecedarius wrote:
| Never heard of it, but I used a third-party system called
| Wycove Forth, back in the 80s. It was unimpressive by today's
| standards but fun enough for teenaged me.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I had a TI 99/4A back in the 80s. TI Logo was pretty good (the
| company had been interested in Logo for some years). The system
| architecture was really nice, and for the time, the 9900
| microprocessor was really elegant.
|
| What doomed the system was TI's vision of a closed architecture,
| with software distributed on cartridges on which TI would make a
| rip-roaring profit. When I read about this vision, I put my
| system up for sale, and sold it a few days before TI announced
| they were getting out of the "home computer" market.
|
| I've never known much about TI's internal workings, but I've
| always imagined that the company, at least at that time, had
| excellent engineers and really clueless management.
| wsc981 wrote:
| Performance-wise I understood that their BASIC interpreter ran
| atop an interpreter in another language, which made BASIC quite
| slow. This at least seems to have been a questionable idea.
|
| But I liked my TI-99/4A and it got me into programming (with
| help from my father).
| endlos wrote:
| I totally did not expect this on HN.
|
| Turns out the TI 99/4A has a thriving community and homebrew
| scene, with two members in particular being exceptionally
| productive.
|
| Those homebrow games created are even of at least an order of
| magnitude higher quality than what was available in the 80s.
| arcadeshopper wrote:
| There are many new developers making games, utilities, new
| versions of languages, a GCC compiler patch to output 9900
| code, a bunch of really cool modern hardware solutions
| including the TIPI that provides a modern hard disk and
| internet connectivity via a raspberry pi. and the F18A VDP
| replacement is on this and many other systems to get VGA out.
| more info: https://www.arcadeshopper.com/wp/ti-99-4a-faq/
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| Here is a list of 99/4a emulators
| https://www.99er.net/emul.shtml One of these emulators is on
| github https://github.com/tursilion/classic99 - in active
| development.
|
| I had the luck of owning a TI99/4A as a kid; it had a very rich
| Basic, with the 16k extension cartridge you even had sprites
| and a synthesizer. I have made some 2d game stuff with pygame
| recently, and for me it felt as if I got back to this old
| machine... (here is this stuff, for the record:
| https://github.com/MoserMichael/pygamewrap )
| chasil wrote:
| TI Basic lacked peek and poke, so no access to assembler was
| available with the base unit, unlike every other competitor.
|
| I would much rather have had something with a 6502.
| wsc981 wrote:
| TI Extended Basic had CALL PEEK and CALL LOAD that could be
| used for similar purposes, from what I've read:
|
| https://www.ninerpedia.org/wiki/Programming#Useful_CALL_LOA
| D...
|
| But you are correct, the base unit didn't have access to
| these functions. You did need to get the TI Extended Basic
| cartridge.
| dnotq wrote:
| The TI-BASIC SandBox was broken:
|
| https://atariage.com/forums/topic/218904-playground/
|
| It was possible BITD too, but no one thought hard enough
| about how to do it. There has been a lot of "pushing the
| hardware" over the last decade. Lots of things that were
| thought of as "not possible" have been done now. The
| 99/4A community is very active, and there is a lot more
| going on than just new games (although that is also a big
| part of the activity).
| tyingq wrote:
| It's also amongst the most affordable old 8-bit choices on
| eBay. I'm not sure why.
| eesmith wrote:
| The TI is a 16-bit computer. Indeed, that was the deciding
| factor to get my Dad to buy a TI for the family.
| tyingq wrote:
| Ah, yes, right. Though with a 16 bit memory bus, like the
| 8-bit machines it competed with, and only 16kb memory.
| buescher wrote:
| TI built a ton of them and closed them out at fire-sale
| prices, and they mostly went into people's closets. It was
| hard to do much with a base model but play its not-so-great
| cartridge games so it has few fans.
|
| The fanatics though - there's really cool stuff people do. I
| think you could cheaply upgrade the memory to 16-bit wide,
| for example.
| compsciphd wrote:
| I spent a lot of time playing parsec and munch-man (yes a
| pac-man clone, but unique in its own way)
| bink wrote:
| Tunnels of Doom was probably my first exposure to
| Dungeons & Dragons. I woulda played that every day if it
| didn't require loading from audio tape via a cassette
| player (a process that was very prone to errors).
| Narishma wrote:
| > Turns out the TI 99/4A has a thriving community and homebrew
| scene
|
| I think that's the case of pretty much all 8 and 16-bit
| machines.
| endlos wrote:
| What I meant to express is that even though the TI 99/4A is
| relatively obscure, especially outside the US, it does have a
| large and active international community.
|
| Its distant and even more obscure relative, the Pyuuta, also
| has a community, but I wouldn't really call it thriving.
| tyingq wrote:
| They sold 2.8 million of them. More than the total sales
| for the VIC-20. For comparison, the C64 was ~15M, original
| Apple II ~6M, Atari 400/800 ~4M.
| jhgb wrote:
| > They sold 2.8 million of them
|
| Internationally? I don't recall having seen any of them
| in Germany in the 1980s. Plenty of Sinclairs and
| Commodores, even an Armstrad, but nothing from TI.
| mmerlin wrote:
| I got one in Australia with Extended Basic, speech
| synthesiser, joysticks and cassette. The sprites were
| next-level cool compared to my friends Apple II, Vic-20
| and Trash-80
|
| I wrote a pretty good frogger clone (with only the road
| part to cross) that worked so well because the event loop
| was just joystick input and call coinc(all) for sprite
| collision with the Y axis value of your frog indicating
| you were in a home base position.
|
| I also wrote a kind of 3 part game where each stage used
| the full resources of the machine, and each stage of the
| game required another load from cassette, which normally
| wipes all your memory and therfore variables so in order
| to pass variables between the stages of the game I wrote
| hex values into the extended font/character set memory,
| because the last few were user editable and retained in
| memory even after fresh program load (which would decode
| the hex from the font character to keep your score and
| number of lives consistent with the prior program/stage
| of the game).
|
| I had Parsec too of course, but way more fun creating
| your own games from scratch, or porting a printout of a
| game from TRS-80 basic and then converting it to use
| sprites.
|
| Aged 11 to 13 I spent my school holidays mostly indoors
| learning to code, fond memories of the magic of discovery
| and creation :)
| mongol wrote:
| They were sold in Sweden, my uncle had one.
| tyingq wrote:
| I can't find any solid stats, but it does seem like most
| of the sales were US and Canada. And probably a fair
| amount of those sales after they priced it below cost
| during their death throes. I believe it was under $50 at
| the end, which was crazy cheap at the time.
| pm215 wrote:
| It was our family's first computer in the UK -- pretty
| sure my Dad picked it up very cheap when the local
| department store were getting rid of the last of their
| stock after TI killed the machine. The lack of commercial
| games for it compared to the Spectrum etc meant I spent
| more time typing in BASIC listings, which was my first
| introduction to computer programming...
| phaedrus wrote:
| As far as I know the Epson QX-10 / QX-16 is the only home
| computer system to have never had a game written for it. I've
| always intended to rectify that situation, since a QX-10 was
| my first computer, but my current QX-16 system didn't come
| with a monitor. It uses a nonstandard 40 Hz refresh rate so
| video capture probably wouldn't work, either (though I've
| never tried).
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Some of them seem to be recent porting requiring backward
| engineering, probably from the Spectrum: will authors like Rasmus
| Moustgaard have performed a full BE, or are there tricks for a
| speedy porting?
| 10GBps wrote:
| TI-99 was my first real computer bought in 1982 for $50 from
| K-mart. I learned to program on it. I remember buying a few
| "whatever" games to get the speech synthesizer for cheap (or
| free?). Took forever to save enough money to buy Extended Basic
| so I could do sprites and stuff.
|
| Fun times. I still have it in the original box with all the carts
| and speech synthesizer. I always wanted that big expansion module
| with the disk drives. Never could afford it.
|
| A few years later got an excellent deal on a used C64 and moved
| on to it where it was a little more open platform.
| icedchai wrote:
| I had a T1-99/4A growing up, probably around 1982 or so when I
| was in elementary school. I "taught" myself BASIC by copying
| programs from the manual it came with. Unfortunately, I had no
| tape or disk drive, so whatever I did disappeared when I turned
| it off.
|
| I also remember playing Parsec:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCSQd0eJKQQ
| tyingq wrote:
| It's funny that the "Snake Plissken" game description doesn't
| mention anything about the movie where the name came from. The
| game play itself is unrelated to the movie, so perhaps that why.
| maliker wrote:
| I did my first programming in basic on a ti-83. Seeing the more
| advanced creations out there in assembly inspired me to learn
| more. These machines are still a great entry into programming.
| kiddico wrote:
| Same here. A friend and I started trying to write solvers for
| our homework and our teacher loved it. He pulled out sync
| cables and stuff for us to use (both of us had second hand
| calculators, lots missing) and gave us hints when we got stuck.
|
| I need to go thank him sometime. That catapulted both of us in
| the direction of a CS degree.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Hah, Turmoil! That was a pretty good Atari 2600 game.
|
| And as far as I know not a very well-known one. Someone gave me
| that cartridge as a gift, and I never knew anyone else who had
| it.
| teddyh wrote:
| Castle Conquer looks like a very similar game to "Hunchback" from
| the Commodore 64.
| ksarul wrote:
| TI sold about 250,000 units in Germany, starting in early 1980.
| They had European manufacturing sites for hardware and software
| in Holland and Italy. They even released a number of software
| packages in a number of European languages--and a few of these
| software packages were unique to the European market. It was
| known outside of Europe as well. It was sold in Japan in 1980,
| Australia and New Zealand, and South America. Argentina even had
| manufacturing facilities for hardware and software, and continued
| building/selling systems until 1986, two years beyond the point
| US and European production stopped.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I had a TI-89 in high school, which was a fair bit more powerful
| than the standard TI-84 (but still similar enough to not get
| confiscated during tests). The extra horsepower let you play some
| crazy stuff: I remember a remake of Doom's E1M1 in stunning
| fidelity, as well as a compromised but still fun 2D version of
| Minecraft. And once the novelty of that wore off, you could
| always dip into some Tetris or Pac-Man.
|
| Actually, screw that calculator. It's probably the reason why I
| failed so many math assignments.
| tgv wrote:
| The TI99 was a basic-computer-in-a-keyboard, not a calculator.
| kevstev wrote:
| The TI-99/4A was an early 16 bit PC from the very early 80s, it
| was not part of the calculator line. The naming is very similar
| though:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
|
| Its relatively obscure, I only know it because it was my first
| computer, given to me as a cast off in the late 80s. I wrote
| basic programs that I copied out of books into it, looking at
| this site I am actually blown away that it had the capabilities
| for "real" games.
| [deleted]
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Its relatively obscure
|
| I don't agree. Maybe it's because you got it in the late 80s,
| and by then it was under powered and there were so many other
| choices like inexpensive IBM PC clones. In the early / mid
| 80s, it was definitely popular where I lived... and it was
| inexpensive compared to things like the Apple 2e. I had two
| friends with TI 99/4a units.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-18 23:00 UTC)