[HN Gopher] The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A
___________________________________________________________________
The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A
Author : rbanffy
Score : 162 points
Date : 2025-02-16 18:56 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I guess next week they're going to get to the interesting bit
| which is how weird the architecture actually was on that thing...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A
|
| Particularly it only had 256 bytes of RAM attached to the CPU but
| had (I think) 16 kb of RAM attached to the video controller which
| the CPU could read and write through I/O registers. You could use
| this for non-video storage but you couldn't access it directly.
|
| Coding in BASIC could, at the very least, hide the insanity from
| you.
| bb88 wrote:
| As I recall at the time, very few people knew how to write
| assembly for that machine, as there just wasn't a lot to go on.
|
| I enjoyed the sprites though, and that was something that was
| definitely different than Apple II, IBM, etc. at the time.
| Apple and IBM's graphics were definitely a step down.
|
| C64 could do sprites with POKE statements apparently. But that
| was definitely not as nice as the TI.
| qiqitori wrote:
| Speaking of interesting bits, this machine isn't actually an
| 8-bit computer, the CPU is 16-bit. (The video controller is
| 8-bit though, i.e. the VRAM data bus is 8-bits. It's also the
| same video controller used in various other machines, e.g.
| MSX.)
| phire wrote:
| "Bits" is a stupid measure of "computer". The TI-99/4A
| clearly belongs in the 8-bit era of computers.
|
| Motorola's 68000 was the single most prolific microprocessor
| of the 16-bit era. Yet all the registers are 32-bit, and all
| the instructions easily operate on 32-bit values _[1]_. About
| the only claim to being "16-bit" is the 16-bit wide data
| bus.
|
| If we go by that metric, then the IBM PC (with its 8088
| hobbled by an 8-bit data bus) is clearly just another 8-bit
| microcomputer.
|
| BTW, this is absolutely the way that Motorola sees it. The
| 68008 is just a 68000 hobbled with an 8-bit data bus, and
| they label it as a 8/32-bit microprocessor.
|
| _[1] And if anyone dares to point out that the 68000 's ALU
| is only 16-bits wide, then I have bad news about the Z-80: It
| only has a 4-bit ALU, so I guess it's actually a 4-bit
| microprocessor_
| bonzini wrote:
| The Amiga was loudly marketed as having a 32-bit CPU though
| (the Atari ST a lot less so, for whatever reason).
|
| Having a 16-bit ALU in theory would make the 9900 a 16-bit
| processor as much as the 8086. The TI-99/4A is definitely
| weird (and slow!!) but it does fit the definition of a
| 16-bit system.
| moosedev wrote:
| The ST very subtly so, even :)
|
| > "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two",
| referring to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and
| 32-bit internals.
|
| via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Well, I was gonna say this: A CPU is X bits if the highest
| number of bits that the value of a "load immediate"
| instruction can have is X. But I think this makes MIPS
| 16-bit.
| phire wrote:
| Worse, that would mean Arm64 is a 12-bit CPU. The
| original 32-bit ARM encoding could only load 8 bit
| immediates, though later versions gained a 16-bit load
| immediate instruction.
|
| RISC-V is a bit better off, as it has a special encoding
| for 20 bit immediates, while Alpha and PowerPC are the
| same as MIPS, stuck with 16-bit immediates.
| qiqitori wrote:
| Ahh, but that would be mean because it would make ARM64
| CPUs 16-bit too. Though actually if you put -1 and it
| sign-extends to 0xFFFF'FFFF'FFFF'FFFF then that's
| technically 64-bit? :p
| spogbiper wrote:
| the motorola 6809 can load 16 bit values into some of its
| registers but i've always seen it called an 8 bit CPU
| McGlockenshire wrote:
| > "Bits" is a stupid measure of "computer".
|
| But that is the very way that they are defined through our
| historical understanding. The 990 platform, established in
| _1973_ , not the 80s, is 16-bit, with 16-bit words and
| 16-bit pointers.
| tom_ wrote:
| Judging by the cycle counts, it's a 16 bit cpu internally?
| Word operations are almost always cheaper, even when there
| are no additional memory accesses for the long case. (I
| think long register to register moves are the only free
| long case. It's been a while, though.)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The '8-bit' micros all had a 16-bit address space, at least
| in their early implementations. (Later we got the eZ80,
| 65816, etc.) which lets you address 64k words of memory and
| the word was always 8-bit bytes.
|
| Contrast that to the PDP-10 [1] which had a 36 bit word and
| a 20-bit address space and could access 256k words for a
| total of 1152 kilobytes.
|
| The use of 8-bit bytes for characters I think killed off
| any word size other than 8-bit because otherwise it would
| be awkward to work with characters. [2] To be efficient you
| have to pack multiple characters into a word, it's
| something that comes up common enough you could create some
| special machine instructions for it, but if you want to
| support a C compiler you need a char _. It 's easiest if
| native pointers point to a byte. If it was otherwise you
| could make up a char_ that consists of a native pointer
| plus a pointer to the char inside the word, but boy what a
| hassle. [3]
|
| Modern computers get many of the benefits of a larger word
| size (wider pipe to suck data through) by having a cache
| system that decouples the memory interface from the CPU, so
| a CPU could ask for 32 bits and get it retrieved 8 bits at
| a time, or it could ask for 32 bits and get the surrounding
| 128 bits stored in the cache so they don't need to be
| retrieved next)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10
|
| [2] DEC had a system of 6-bit characters, which divides
| nicely into 36, but you have the same problem
|
| [3] That PDP-10 _did_ have deep pointers that could point
| to a specific range of bits inside a word, that 's what you
| need if you want something like that to be reasonable to
| program. I've been thinking about a fantasy computer to run
| inside Javascript and came across a 48-bit word size to use
| doubles efficiently to store words. That thing would have
| 24-bit address spaces, plus it would be possible to make
| 'deep pointers' that have 6 bits of offset and 6 bits of
| length (with the possibility of 0-length to point to a
| specific bit) and could be extended to 'wide pointers' by
| putting a few bits in front that would reference particular
| address spaces (might be video RAM, or a unit of memory
| protection, or made contiguous to represent a larger
| address space) I think I'd want enough to make a 1GB word
| address space so it could outdo a 32-bit machine and then
| let the rest be used for flags just to make it as baroque
| as possible... And that's why you only see 8-bit words
| today!
| fallous wrote:
| Wait'll you discover that different CPUs use different word
| lengths, and not just your expected 8-bit X power-of-2 of
| current modern processors). 36-bit native word with a 9 bit
| databus and a 16-bit address bus with 64 kilowords of
| memory... welcome to the fun of early digital computing.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| The other early 16-bit CPUs include:
|
| National Instrument's PACE- I've never seen one used in
| anything:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Semiconductor_PACE
|
| but its bit-slice precursor, the IMP-16 was used in Aston
| Martin's Lagonda https://sprague.com/peter-sprague/aston-
| martin/
|
| https://opposite-lock.com/topic/90934/lagonda-dashboards
|
| General Instrument's CP1600, used in the Intellivision (a
| video game console yes, but there was a home computer
| keyboard attachment).
|
| http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/chips/GICP1600.pdf
|
| Its co-processor, the CP1640 is famous for evolving into
| Microchip's PIC microcontroller.
| kragen wrote:
| Much more influential 16-bit CPUs from that era include the
| PDP-11's CPU, the Data General Nova's CPU, the Xerox Alto's
| CPU, and arguably even the 8086 and 8088. The chronology
| seems to go as follows:
|
| - 01965: IBM 1130
|
| - 01966: HP 2116A, the first model of the HP 2100 series
|
| - 01969: Nova
|
| - 01970: PDP-11
|
| - 01971: IBM System/7
|
| - 01973: Alto (not shipped. NEVER shipped)
|
| - 01973: TI-990 (the 990/3, according to
| https://cozx.com/dpitts/ti990.html)
|
| - 01974: HP 3000
|
| - 01974: PACE (which was from National Semiconductor, not
| National Instruments)
|
| - 01975: CP1600
|
| - 01976: TMS9900 (what the TI-99/4A used)
|
| - 01976: Tandem (first Tandem/16 shipped to Citibank)
|
| - 01978: 8086
|
| - 01979: 8088
|
| - 01981: TI-99/4A
|
| Since there were plenty of 6-bit, 8-bit, 12-bit, 32-bit,
| 36-bit, 60-bit, and 64-bit CPUs in the 01950s, you'd think
| there would be some 16-bit CPUs then too, but I can't think
| of any. I'd even forgotten about the HP 2100 until I went
| looking just now.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Depends what you call '16-bit'. The addressable word size
| [1] for the PDP-11 was 8-bits and the problem space
| address space was 16-bits so a user program on the PDP-11
| could ac cess 64kB of RAM, same as an Apple ][, except
| that multiple users could have their own address spaces.
|
| The IBM 360 had 24-bit addresses, 8-bit words, and 16
| 32-bit registers.
|
| 8-bit words were thoroughly established by 1980s for
| general purpose computers, I think because of the use of
| 7/8-bit ASCII characters. I mean, you could pack ASCII
| characters into larger words in different ways but the
| most comfortable (portable) way to handle them is to have
| a char* which requires either 8-bit words or some way to
| address subwords.
|
| The PDP-10 was probably the most loved heterodox
| architecture with a 20-bit address space and 36-bit
| words. It had pointers that could point to specific bits
| inside a word so it was possible to port C to it with
| char*'s. The user space was 256k words and 1152M bytes.
| (If an architecture like the PDP-10 let you access bits
| in the next word you could even point something like a
| char* at a variable sized UTF-8 char if you don't mind
| pointer arithmetic being limited to scans)
|
| Some of the 8-bit micros had 16-bit registers such as the
| 8086/8088 and the 6809. The word size doesn't have to be
| related to the size of the data bus: the 8088 had an
| 8-bit data bus and the 8086 had a 16-bit data bus, it
| just pumped twice if it needed 16-bits. The 68k series
| had 32-bit registers and a 32-bit address space (like the
| DEC VAX which was the first modern computer) but had
| various bus sizes as low as 8-bits in the 68008.
|
| With a cache the data bus could be larger than the word
| size.
|
| Programming really isn't fun if you don't have index
| registers at least as large as the address space. There
| were numerous attempts to extend 8-bit architectures to a
| 24-bit address space that didn't provide large enough
| index registers, the 65816 is probably the most famous.
| The eZ80 on the other hand, extends the registers to
| 24-bits so it's easy to write programs that use the whole
| address space.
|
| [1] which I'm just going to call word size
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Famous 16-bit computer from the 1950s:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_I
|
| A interesting 12-bit microcontroller I just learned about
| is the "Toshiba Transistor Works" TLCS-12 for Ford's
| engine control module (1973). I'm trying to find a full
| datasheet for it:
|
| https://www.shmj.or.jp/english/pdf/ic/exhibi739E.pdf
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_EEC
|
| https://www.cpu-world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=304576
| phire wrote:
| It gets way weirder.
|
| The TMS9900 didn't have any internal data registers. It only
| had a program counter, a status register, and a workspace
| pointer. Instead, it put the "registers" in that same 256 bytes
| of RAM. There were sixteen 16-bit registers which the workspace
| pointer pointed to.
|
| The original idea was that this made for fast context switches,
| instead of dumping all registers to stack (it doesn't even have
| a stack pointer), just update the workspace pointer to point at
| a new set. But I have to assume this wasn't really used on the
| TI-99/4A, as there just wasn't enough RAM. Because your only
| other ram was locked behind the video controller, that 256
| bytes had to contain all your registers, any your dynamically
| loaded code and any data you wanted rapid access to.
|
| The TMS9900 is weird, because it's the only CPU of the early
| home computer era that wasn't designed for microcomputers. It's
| actually an implementation of the TI-990 mini-computer on a
| single chip and is actually used in later versions of the
| minicomputer. Those minicomputers had more than enough fast
| 16-bit memory to take advantage of this fast context switching.
|
| Every other commonly used microprocessor of the 70s (8080,
| 6800, F8, 6502, RCA1802, Z80, 6809, 8086, 68000) was explicitly
| designed to target the low-cost microcomputer market.
| McGlockenshire wrote:
| I've been working on a TMS99110 homebrew & emulator, and have
| studied the architecture of the 990 a whole lot over the past
| couple years. I want to make a very important distinction in
| a few things you said.
|
| For anyone that didn't get the context, it's the 99/4 design
| that has this weird RAM layout. The 990 architecture itself
| can use any (16-bit) word in memory as the starting point of
| the 16 registers. Developers have been known to use and abuse
| the workspace pointer to slide around the "window" on the
| registers.
|
| The window itself also uses the top three registers to link
| back to the previous workspace, status, and PC, if you use
| the proper instructions to branch and return. While there is
| no stack*, you can still crawl back through those references
| and get the state of each call.
|
| It's a really cool little architecture, hobbled by the 16-bit
| address space and how slow it was to keep the registers in
| RAM. Nowadays I can pick up a 1MB memory chip that's faster
| than the native bus speed for a few bucks, but that wasn't
| anywhere near the case in the late 70s and early 80s.
|
| *: The 990/12 minicomputer features the PSHS and POPS
| instructions, which take a pointer to a definition of where
| the stack lives and how big it should be. These instructions
| are not implemented in any production processor, but the
| platform makes it possible to emulate these instructions in
| software transparently... as an actual explicit instead of
| accidental feature in the later few iterations. The 990/12
| itself was microcoded on a set of four daisy-chained
| programmable 4-bit bit slicers so they didn't need any of
| that nonsense.
| bregma wrote:
| If you disasembled the ROMs you'd find they're filled with
| BLWP/RTWP instructions. That's how subroutines were executed:
| Branch and Load Workspace Pointer. The BLWP instruction would
| load the WP and PC from the next two words and save the
| current WP/PC/SR into the new R13/14/15. RTWP would restore
| R13/14/15 into WP/PC/SR. The end result was a stack
| implemented as a linked list instead of a contiguous array. A
| lot of the subroutines in ROM just read/wrote tokens from/to
| the VRAM and then interpreted them as BASIC.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Back when I lived in Texas and they started doing vanity
| plates, I applied for the plate "BLWP" (I lived in D/FW and
| visited Lubbock from time to time, so there was a non-zero
| chance someone driving by would get it.) After waiting a
| month, I got the letter from the DPS... no... someone beat
| me to it. So I guess there were at least two fans of the
| 990's memory-to-memory architecture out there.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| So before people start saying "OMG! Memory-to-Memory
| architectures are so slow! What a stupid idea!" allow me to
| remind people that back in the early 70s when the 960 was
| turning into the 990, external bipolar memory was faster than
| on-chip NMOS static RAM. And since the 960 and 990 were
| originally implemented with a weird collection of ASICs,
| discrete parts and 7400-series logic chips, the idea that you
| would just drop a bipolar part in the design wasn't that
| weird of an idea. But then as the 990 evolved and TI built a
| single chip implementation, they retained the memory-to-
| memory architecture for software compatibility reasons. So
| yeah... ultimately... CMOS logic got faster than bipolar
| memory and in retrospect it wasn't the greatest design. But
| at the time it wasn't THAT bad of an idea. And yeah, it did
| make task switching very fast. But don't get me started on
| serial IO off the CPU. And dang, what a great, largely
| orthogonal instruction set. I sometimes fire up the Assembler
| / Editor on my 99/4 emulator just to play with it.
|
| Anywho... this isn't a critique of the OP or @phire, it's a
| reminder for the community at large that tech decisions that
| seem bad in retrospect often had non-idiotic motivations at
| the time.
| lightedman wrote:
| "Coding in BASIC could, at the very least, hide the insanity
| from you."
|
| Except TI-BASIC is a hell-riddled double-interpreted language.
| I had a 99/4A at the age of 6, learned how to use all of the
| TI-BASIC language by 8, and said screw that, hardware it is for
| me, dad's buying me a 286 for Christmas, time to learn how to
| build that!
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| This was my very first computer, at age 13. I learned hexadecimal
| by drawing pictures of spaceships on graph paper, coloring in the
| squares that had lines through them, splitting the grid into 8x8
| sections with a ruler, converting each row of 8 pixels into a
| hexadecimal number, and then typing them all into DATA
| statements, just to see the picture take shape on my screen when
| I ran the program. For some reason, I thought that was just the
| coolest. About a year later I upgraded to the Commodore 64, but
| I'll always have a spot in my heart for my TI.
| neomantra wrote:
| This was my first computer as well! (age 8?) And I too spent
| time in class drawing spaceships on graph paper, rather than
| listening to the teacher. I was certainly obsessed with BASIC
| programming. I didn't start assembly language until the Apple
| IIe a few years later.
|
| I'm surprised now to see it was a 16-bit CPU -- I had no idea.
| I assumed 8-bit as most home computers were (6502, Z80, etc).
|
| Two things I remember:
|
| Saving and loading programs on cassette tapes (where are they?
| I'm jealous of another poster who still has their TI99/4a).
|
| It was insanely easy to reboot it accidentally -- I had to look
| it up again but apparently it was by pressing Shift-Q [1]. I
| lost some work several times, until I got the muscle anti-
| memory.
|
| [1] https://www.99er.net/994.html
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| Yeah, the cassette tape was an awesome bit of technology.
| Once I got one, I didn't have to type in the USS Enterprise
| program every time I wanted to see it. It also made for nice
| lo-fi background music. :)
|
| https://parkscomputing.com/page/compute-magazine-archives
| buildsjets wrote:
| I still have my TI-99/4A! I received it Christmas morning of
| 1983, although a Timex/Sinclair had been on my wish list. Sears
| had them marked down to $50 during the 8-bit wars. Mom had been
| up all night hand-typing in a BASIC demo so it would be running
| in the morning. Many Wumpuses were hunted that day.
|
| Today, it has a F17A video processor that enables VGA output:
| https://dnotq.io/f18a/intro.html
|
| And a FinalGROM99 cartridge, so I can have an SD card with all
| the program cartridges loaded.
| https://endlos99.github.io/finalgrom99/
|
| There's still a community of fairly active development for
| retrogames, and some of them are quite good given capabilities of
| the hardware. My niece particularly enjoys a marble game called
| Skyway, try it on the online emulator at https://ti99ers.com
| bee_rider wrote:
| > Mom had been up all night hand-typing in a BASIC demo so it
| would be running in the morning. Many Wumpuses were hunted that
| day.
|
| Hah, that's a bit of special effort into making Christmas a
| little bit more magic. Was she a tech person of some kind?
| manyturtles wrote:
| Well she was smarter than those families who paid for the
| cartridge edition of "Hunt the Wumpus", like mine.
| buildsjets wrote:
| She was a High School math teacher, but had an intensest in
| computing and programming from working on her Master's
| degree, where she learned state-of-the art COBOL programming.
| The first computer we had in the house at all was a few years
| previous, when her school district allowed her to take home a
| brand new Commodore PET over the summer break. On that
| machine, many stick-figure men were hung from the gallows. ht
| tps://www.commodoregames.net/CommodorePET/Hangman-(2)-342....
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I've been buying and restoring older stuff (2013 Mac Pro most
| recently, recapped a Mac SE before that) and I think you just
| gave my 99 4/a new life. Thanks for that!
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Today, it has a F17A video processor that enables VGA output:
| https://dnotq.io/f18a/intro.html
|
| This is awesome. I don't have a TI-99, but I do have an MSX
| that would hugely benefit from this.
| seemaze wrote:
| >Many Wumpuses were hunted that day
|
| Oh man! I remember playing 'Hunt the Wumpus'[0] with my cousins
| on my grandfathers TI-99 in the mid 80's. Probably the first
| computer I ever touched!
|
| In the spirit of HN pedantry, should the plural be Wumpi? I
| will concede that wumpuses is way more fun to say..
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus
| geocrasher wrote:
| I'll never forget the TI-99/4A. I was 8 years old, in second
| grade in Southern California. We had a "computer lab" which was a
| mobile building with 13 or 15 TI-99/4A's, and about half of them
| had color TV's and the rest, B+W. Nobody really knew anything,
| but we did have books to copy BASIC programs out of.
|
| One kid entered a program that flashed colors and patterns on the
| color TV. Our teacher was epileptic, and this sent her into a
| seizure. Myself and another kid ran to get the 5th grade teacher
| who'd been a doctor at some point (don't ask, I dont know, I was
| 8) and he came running and attended to her. She was fine.
|
| I'd always been interested in how things work, taking things
| apart, playing with my 30-in-1 electronics lab from Radio Shack.
| But this new computer thing... this was _something_. That
| experience flipped a bit in my 8 year old brain. All because of a
| TI-99 /4A.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| I love this story, but not because the teacher had epilepsy!
| The flashing colors, and ability to draw from the center of the
| screen to the outer bounds, and showing it happen in real time
| (since the graphics weren't so fast then) was a huge factor in
| me getting involved in programming. I started off with Atari
| BASIC, and my first program of my own was a strobe light, where
| I could control the speed and generate a random color to
| display on each "strobe".
|
| Once I saw how fun that was to actually run and show friends
| (which I think was the big draw for me in the 80's), I created
| an English to Pig Latin translator, which was more based on an
| official example, but I remember putting more work into it,
| including a trigger for certain "bad words" my friends would
| definitely enter, and giving them a surprise flash and warning.
| Not sophisticated in any way, just a bunch of IF statements for
| specific words, then a fall through for anything not matching
| to be translated.
|
| I used to have a book on experiments using a 6-volt battery,
| and I got my son one of those 30-in-1 kits, and we had a lot of
| fun with it. I was more easily able to move from the electronic
| kit to software with him, having had interest in both, and now
| he's picked up the software itch.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| My god, your classmate hacked the teacher!
| xweb wrote:
| My first computer as well! I remember typing game code from a
| magazine and saving it to the cassette tape. My big Christmas
| present the next year was the giant expansion box with the floppy
| drive.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Same here, I'm in the TI-99 as first computer club as well.
|
| 98% of what I did on it was just play cartridge games, but I
| did have a year or so of trying to type in Basic programs from
| library magazines. None of them ever came close to working
| since they were never for TI's weird dialect of Basic and I
| didn't know anything about the differences. Mostly what I did
| was CALL COLOR instructions for some pretty colors. I think the
| furthest I ever got with Basic was the "higher/lower" guess-
| the-number game. Eventually then we got a Tandy 1000 with GW-
| Basic and I moved on to that.
|
| Parsec still rocks hard though. I've rolled over the score on
| it: http://dos486.com/misc/parsec.jpg
| phrotoma wrote:
| > Parsec still rocks hard though.
|
| Hell yes it does. Good shot commander!
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I didn't really get into Parsec. Tombstone City was my jam.
| And then I bought the Editor / Assembler package and it came
| with the source for Tombstone City as an example. It turns
| out the algorithm for figuring out which tumbleweed was going
| to turn into a monster was very simple. Reading that one bit
| of the source, I was able to predict where the bad guys would
| spawn and be ready for them. After that I could flip the
| counter and pretty much play as long as I wanted on two or
| three lives.
|
| But yes. Old games. They rock.
| tssva wrote:
| Never knew the TI-99/4A was useful for anything but playing
| Parsec. That's all I ever did on my BFF Mark's TI-99/4A. Then I
| would go home, use my C64 and be grateful my parents didn't get
| me a TI-99/4A.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Although I did love playing Parsec (and Fathom and TI Invaders
| and Munch Man and ...), I did a significant amount of
| programming on mine.
|
| First I made a text-based "cave explorer" deal, with
| significant randomization, various choices that might lead to
| pits, monsters, rockfalls, and the like, with warnings and the
| ability to "back up." Also, some character creation business
| for Dungeons and Dragons (doing all of the attribute rolling,
| then selecting an optimal class, then doing the hitpoints, then
| some money, and on to one of twenty convenient "equipment
| packs" I designed), right on out to the printouts. Math drills.
|
| I made a fairly dumb video game that drew in an uninspiring
| manner from Berzerk and Pac-Man and the like, which was quite
| slow due to the various walls and pits and such which had to be
| checked for in many lines of tedious IF THEN ELSE statements
| ... but then I hit on the idea of merely _drawing_ all of these
| items and then checking the video register to see what was
| there, resulting in a massive speedup, or as much as one could
| manage using doubly-interpreted BASIC.
|
| After I got the Speech Synthesis module, I revisited some of my
| dumb little games and added some voice bits, not much more than
| your Sinistar "I hunger!" bits.
|
| My last was Black Cat, wherein your titular cat had to cross
| traffic (like Frogger) on one screen, navigate various screens
| of terrain, visit a child at school, and eventually find your
| way home, hopefully bringing with you a bird or mouse as a
| trophy for bonus points.
|
| I only ever played Temple of Apshai on the Commodore.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Wasn't this originally designed for military use?
|
| It failed the requirements and was then repurposed by TI?
| McGlockenshire wrote:
| The thing that became the 990 minicomputer was developed for a
| hotel chain. Perhaps you're thinking of another?
|
| Source: David Pitts, who worked on the platform.
| https://www.cozx.com/dpitts/ti990.html
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Pretty sure I read something long ago (20 years back?) about
| the 9900 and some strange problems in a missile controller
| application.
|
| Turns out there was a variant called SBP9900 which was
| hardened for military use.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I think that was the Recursiv, that was built by some TI
| escapees in Britain. But this is based on very old neurons,
| so I could DEFINITELY be wrong on this one. Just offering
| what I think I remember.
|
| TI definitely had a defense oriented business up until the
| late 90s when they sold their Defense Semiconductor
| Engineering Group (DESG) to (I think) Raytheon.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| So... my grand-mother worked for DeGolyer as a computer (back
| when that was a person who manually computed figures with a
| slide rule or mechanical calculator.) And my grand-father was
| one of the original investors in GSI (which later became TI.)
| The 990 and 960 were a bit before my time, but I remember my
| uncle (who at the time of his retirement was supposedly the
| longest serving TI employee, having worked there from 1946 to
| 2007) talking about having 960 systems on-board boats in the
| Gulf of Mexico to calculate seismic reflection data. But I
| found this link:
|
| https://forums.atariage.com/topic/373742-ti-960-texas-
| instru...
|
| so maybe I'm mis-remembering it. But wasn't the 990 already
| planned as being a cost reduced version of the 960 and 980?
| Though in those days it seemed like a lot of computer systems
| were being built for specific customers. The story I heard
| about the 8008 and TMX1795 were they were built exclusively
| to win the DataPoint terminal contract.
|
| More info on the TMX1795 from Ken Sherriff:
| https://www.righto.com/2015/05/the-texas-instruments-
| tmx-179...
|
| Thx for the reference in your post, but it doesn't say
| anything about the 990 being developed for a Hotel Chain
| (though I have a distinct memory of it being used as a prop
| in the TV series "Hotel" --
| https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=578 ) Maybe
| you saw the hotel reference on a different page?
| rietta wrote:
| There is a working one in the gaming area of the Computer History
| Museum in Roswell, GA. The instructions direct you to play the
| Wumpus game but you can go to ti-basic and other programs
| instead.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| I have such mixed feelings about the TI-99/4A.
|
| It was our family computer. We rented games for it, and that was
| fun. I learned BASIC. I tried to create things with it, as
| advertised, and sort of only semi-succeeded repeatedly.
|
| My parents saw that I was running into the limits of the system,
| and got me both the Extended Basic and Terminal Emulator II
| cartridges. I dug into Extended Basic, and was able to write
| "games" with actual sprites that could be manipulated! There they
| were, flying around, those sprites. That being said, these games
| always ended up being quite bad, and there wasn't a clear path
| for them to being much better. We were part of a users group, and
| the Extended Basic games others were making were perhaps more
| refined but also honestly not much better.
|
| At the same time, Atarisoft were releasing epic cartridges for
| the TI. A strangely OK Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac Man, as good or
| better than on the other home computers. It was clear there was
| no path at all from whatever was going on with the Extended Basic
| cartridge to whatever magic voodoo allowed for the TI ports of
| these arcade games. (To be honest, I still don't really
| understand it, other than something to do with... GROM?
| Assembly?)
|
| On the other hand, Terminal Emulator II, which my parents bought
| me so I could fool around with the TI's speech synthesizer,
| taught me about the need to connect to online services via a
| modem. I asked my parents about getting a modem, and they were
| like... "no".
|
| My pre-teen brain was like "I need to buy myself a modem as soon
| as I can!"
|
| I bought a 1200 baud modem out of Computer Shopper for mere
| dollars when I was 16. It changed my life. I got on boards, and
| then the Internet, before most - and probably you. I learned
| networking and architecture. No regrets.
|
| But I still have no idea whatsoever how those TI programmers
| bridged the gap between my horrifically bad Extended Basic
| programs, where I felt I had maxed out the capabilities of the
| computer, and the magnificent games and arcade ports available
| via cartridge. It sort of haunts me. What even?
| progmetaldev wrote:
| The difference is definitely Assembly. You could dip into
| heavier memory management, and control every aspect from that
| low level.
|
| I got on to my local public library (in the US) with an 800
| baud modem on the Atari 8-bit. There was barely any security,
| which was all bypassed by "password". I could check out books
| for individuals, alter the amount they owed in late-fees, or
| erase that someone had a book and then erase that the book ever
| existed. I have always been more of a white/grey hacker, as far
| as I don't always report an exploit, but I don't abuse it
| either. Now that I'm older, I am happy to report exploits
| confidentially.
|
| I quickly found the BBS in my area were not as usable at 800
| baud, and moved to a 286 with a modem slightly higher baud.
| Until my family got a 386, it was a bit slow, but I was still
| sitting there like an addict consuming my digital fix! Even in
| the mid-90's I was amazed at the speed of modems coming out. I
| believe in 1997/early 1998 I had saved enough money to buy
| myself my own PC, and had a faster modem. I'm not sure what the
| speed was back then, but it was good enough to play Quake 1. I
| started to lose touch with the low-level of computers around
| that time, but also saw the value in higher-level programming.
| I think having understood lower-level computers in my early
| years helped me to understand things like memory management in
| current days, where a lot of my co-workers have no concept of
| running into memory problems until they hit a wall.
| rapnie wrote:
| I remember I made a (in my eyes) pretty decent Donkey Kong in
| Extended Basic with my father. But we knew nothing about better
| variants, so our impression wasn't spoiled by that. I am sure
| the program and game was pretty crude in comparison to what you
| tried to get out of this TI device, but we had no notion of
| "maxing out the capabilities". We just programmed and had
| tremendous fun. Printing out the entire program on a matrix
| printer, and annotating changes with a pen. Precious times.
| schlupa wrote:
| The fundamental issue with BASIC on the TI-99/4A, be it the
| regular BASIC or even the Extended BASIC, is that the program
| was stored in the video memory. This meant that you couldn't
| use all features of the VDP, you could only use a limited
| number of tiles (96 afaicr), you could not use other graphics
| mode, raster interrupts and sprite multiplexing, forget it. The
| games on cartridges were not limited to that and could use up
| to 24K (afaicr) of machine code + a lot of GROM. One needs only
| to look at what a Coleco console or a MSX1 could do with a
| system that didn't use the graphic chip for what it was not
| intended to be.
| abecedarius wrote:
| There was a cartridge with an assembler & text editor plus a
| little CPU RAM. (4k? My memory is gone but it certainly wasn't
| much even for the 80s.) You'd still need to use cassette tape
| to save your work. Ah it was this:
| https://www.arcadeshopper.com/wp/ti-99-4a-faq-mini-memory/
|
| For actually usable development you could buy a TI expansion
| box, 32K RAM expansion, and 5 1/4" floppy drive. This cost the
| equivalent of like two thousand bucks today. Less than an Apple
| ][, somewhat more than a base C-64, but a lot more than the
| TI-99 itself.
|
| My parents were very indulgent in this. Once I had this setup,
| I bought a third-party Forth and coded my own Forth assembler
| vocabulary, and finally had a reasonably capable dev env, for
| maybe a year before leaving for college. But still had
| basically no way to share my work (wasn't online).
| bregma wrote:
| The mini-memory cart has 4k of CPU RAM and a line-by-line
| assembler, no text editor.
|
| It also has no disassembler. I spent many many hours dumping
| the ROMS using easy-bug and disassembling them by hand. Many
| happy hours.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. From my link:
|
| > Each source statement you enter is immediately assembled
| into object code and stored into memory. Some source code
| is retained in a nine-page text buffer. You can scroll the
| screen to review previously entered lines of source code by
| pressing the Up- and down-arrow keys.
|
| I gave up on this system pretty quick -- with so little
| space for your code, it just wasn't worth so much trouble.
| aghilmort wrote:
| sprites were amazing for the time and then came the amiga!
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I asked my parents about getting a modem, and they were
| like... "no".
|
| I asked my parents for a modem the same year Matthew
| Broderick's "Wargames" came out. My mom forbid me from ever
| using one because she had seen a movie about what happens when
| you have one of those things...
| Dwedit wrote:
| Basically, a whole lot like the ColecoVision, Sega SG-1000, or
| MSX, but without the Z80?
| randombits0 wrote:
| Anybody with interest in the video chip, the TMS9918A, might like
| the Pico 9918 project, a drop-in replacement that uses a
| Raspberry Pi Pico.
| rbc wrote:
| I wanted the TI-99/4 that was marketed at the beginning of the
| 80s. As it turned out, I didn't own a computer until buying a
| Tandy PC-6 pocket computer in the mid-eighties.
|
| Fast forward to buying the later TI-99/4A in the beige case in
| 2023. Booting it up into the Basic prompt gave me a nice
| flashback to learning Basic in High School on the Radio Shack
| TRS-80 Model I.
|
| I've also bought its cousin the TI-74 BASICALC. Given hindsight,
| the TI-74 is my favorite TI-99 for retro computing, even though
| the similarity is limited to a subset of the TI Basic from the
| TI-99 family. The TI-74s are rugged and available. It's very
| useful as a desk calculator.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| This seems like an expensive hobby, but one that chases that
| feeling we first got off our first system! I often wish that I
| understood hardware a bit more when I learned Atari 8-bit
| BASIC, in the late 80's/early 90's, and would have known to
| keep everything wrapped up in an environment that wasn't humid.
| I feel the one I learned on, owned by my dad, was probably
| moved to the basement storage and is completely corroded at
| this point.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I still have both the 74ALC and a CC-40. I'm embarrassed to say
| I didn't pick up on how the 74 was essentially just a re-
| skinned CC-40 until about 10 years ago. You can apparently get
| a plug adapter for the 74 that lets you drive CC-40 peripherals
| (not that there are a lot of them around.)
| EarlKing wrote:
| OK, this seems like a good thread to ask about something that was
| contemporary to the TI-99/4A ... namely, the idea of "Fairware".
| As near as I can tell this term was coined to refer to freeware
| at a time when that term was still trademarked by Andrew
| Fluegelman / Headlands Press, and seems largely to have been
| current among TI-99/4A users (probably because after their
| platform got orphaned freeware/fairware was all they had), but
| not so much anywhere else (with a few exceptions, and then
| probably because by the time anyone had heard of it Andrew was
| dead and his trademark died not long after, so everyone took to
| calling freeware 'freeware'... or shareware, since that term had
| also been coined to get around that trademark).
|
| Anyway, the question is: Who actually coined the term "fairware"?
| I did some preliminary research in old periodicals and books, but
| I never came to a satisfactory answer. The closest I found it
| that it might have been one of the sysops of the TI conference on
| ... I think either Compuserve or GEnie? Either way, I never found
| any smoking gun, and this is one of those bits of historical
| trivia where not knowing the answer irritates me greatly. I tried
| asking around on the Atari Age forums, but I guess the right kind
| of graybeards don't hang out around there. Maybe someone here
| will know the answer?
| manyturtles wrote:
| I didn't know the TI-99/4A was 16-bit until many years later when
| the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were taking over from the
| Spectrum, C-64 and Amstrad (in the UK). Aside from the refueling
| tunnels getting a bit tricky later on in Parsec, I have fond
| memories of Alpiner and Pirate's Adventure. That latter one being
| the bundled game with the Adventure cartridge, requiring you to
| insert the cartridge (containing parser etc., I think) and then
| load the particular adventure story from tape.
| whyenot wrote:
| I have dim memories of going to a show in San Francisco's Brooks
| Hall(?) called TI-Fest. It was a show all for TI's home computers
| and they had the speech synthesizer and some kind of expansion
| chassis and lots of other stuff. My dad was looking for a home
| computer that me and my brother could use, so he brought us
| along. The show was exciting, at least that's the way I remember
| it. There was this feeling that something big was happening.
|
| Dad ended up buying an Atari 800 instead of a 99/4A. It was a
| good decision.
| sprior wrote:
| I had one for a while in my early teens and it had the floppy
| disk drive option. I did some sprite and graphics programming.
| It's obviously been a long time and I was young so I could be
| mistaken, but one bad experience I had with it was that the
| filesystem considered a file either a program or data and there
| was no obvious way (to me) to switch between the two. Well one
| day the machine decided that my basic files were data and not
| programs and so I lost them.
| abecedarius wrote:
| After so long I have no idea, but... that floppy file system
| also had a notion of copy-protected files. It turned out to be
| straightforward to work around that copy protection, so maybe
| there was some similar way around the data/program thing.
|
| (All I remember is reading the docs of the filesystem calls and
| thinking "hm, could you do thus-and-so" and being a bit
| surprised it just worked.)
| jeffheard wrote:
| My dad taught me to read with Dr Seuss and the TI-99/4A BASIC
| programming manual. Starting writing my first programs at 4. Love
| that old machine. There was a sort of Gradius knock off for it
| called Parsec that I played the hell out of too.
|
| When I was a little older I would borrow books at the library to
| write games in BASIC. Basically key stuff in that the book told
| you to write, and since a lot of it was for the C64 or TRS-80 I
| had to figure out how to "port" it to the TI. I wrote notes for
| my changes in pencil in the library books so I wouldn't get in
| trouble with the librarian. Invariably I'd check the book out
| again a few weeks after I'd returned it. I was probably the only
| person who read my notes, but I like to think someone got some
| use out of my addenda.
| power wrote:
| Wrote my first programs for this too, at 7. Copied from the
| manual with no understanding but eventually writing my own. The
| only coder in the house! Didn't write anything decent until the
| C64 when I made a few small games.
|
| Great memories of Parsec too.
| gossamer wrote:
| My first computer!
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| I had one when I was like 11 or so. Loved its fake Pacman game. I
| learned some Basic. Such a distinct memory of spending a whole
| day copying a program from Byte magazine (or something like it),
| getting the game to run well after my bedtime, playing it one or
| two times, then... just turning off the computer, losing all that
| work. I was never able to convince my mom to buy the fancy tape
| recorder that would have let me save programs. It was a while
| till I programmed again, but the seed was definitely planted.
| lightedman wrote:
| My first computer. Played Blast-O!, Hunt The Wumpus, Chisolm
| Trail, A-MAZE-ING, and a couple other games. Learned the crummy
| programming language of TI-BASIC, gave up on software and stuck
| with hardware ever since.
|
| Funny enough, now as part of my job, I advise TI on various
| upcoming power ranges for various lighting types, and they do on
| occasion make an IC based on my specs for general production.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I'm embarrassed to say how often I visit js99er.net to play the
| old TI version of Hunt the Wumpus. I should have something
| better to do with my finite time on Earth.
| unreal37 wrote:
| I loved my little TI-99/4A...
|
| I used to lay down in the living room and transcribe BASIC from
| COMPUTE! magazine into it, and customize them, and that's how I
| learned to program.
| johnnyballgame wrote:
| Same here. I specifically remember staying home "sick" from
| school just so I could transfer those COMPUTE! programs from
| paper to screen and eventually to cassette tape! Still have the
| entire setup except for the 13" Montgomery Ward TV it was
| connected to. I owe my entire tech career to my parents buying
| me that little TI from Shopko in 1983.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| The graphics chip on this thing was a big deal. Variants ended up
| in the ColecoVision, the MSX line of computers and Sega's SG-1000
| console. Later machines like the MSX2 and the Sega Master System
| had backwards-compatible but entirely different evolutions of the
| design.
|
| Quite an impact for a graphics chip coming from a rather
| unsuccessful computer. I never played around with or even saw a
| TI-99 but from my understanding the CPU needing to use VRAM as
| data storage (because the system RAM was way too low for the
| time), accessed through IO ports, really hampered the machine.
|
| While it lacked the hardware scrolling, massive master palette
| and display list tricks of the Atari machines, it displayed
| multi-color high-resolution graphics with ease. Being able to set
| a different color for each line of a background tile allowed for
| really detailed art.
|
| Only 4 sprites per line like the Atari (not counting the weird
| missiles), but the TI-99 sprites are 16 pixels wide and high-
| resolution, rather than 8 fat pixels wide, and there's 32 to work
| with in total rather than needing to use raster splits to
| multiplex sprites.
|
| Way ahead of its time. MSX homebrew games like Mini Ghost, The
| Cure, Invasion of the Zombie Monsters, etc. really show what it
| can do.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _Way ahead of its time. MSX homebrew games like Mini Ghost,
| The Cure, Invasion of the Zombie Monsters, etc. really show
| what it can do._
|
| Too bad that at the time, TI actively discouraged third party
| developers from developing software for the TI-99/4(A) - they
| were selling the machines below production cost (because of the
| difficult market and the competition from cheaper mostly
| Commodore models) and hoped to recoup the losses by selling
| software (according to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A#Lack_of_third-
| party_d...).
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| Yeah that was a big mistake.
| dahauns wrote:
| > While it lacked the hardware scrolling
|
| That's the biggest "what if" omission of the TMS9918 for me - I
| wonder how the 8-bit landscape would have evolved if it had
| even minimal support like the scroll registers of the VIC-II...
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| I'm more shocked that the MSX2 graphics chip (before the plus
| revision) had a "screen adjust" register but no border
| blanking for horizontal scrolling. Massive miss there, much
| worse than the lack of scrolling on the original TMS9918
| which was developed at a time where scrolling wasn't all that
| common.
| nurettin wrote:
| I only had a TI-85 to impress girls with polar equations.
| mturk wrote:
| I do so love the TI-99/4A. I've been going through some TI-99/4A
| disk archives from the Chicago Texas Instruments User Group
| (which streams its meetings every month) and one of my favorite
| finds so far was this fun demo:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejGlI0yxqGA
|
| Over at https://js99er.net/ there's a fair bit of software
| available right from the web interface, as well.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I had a TI-99/4A. I learned to program from the excellent Basic
| manual that came with it. I wrote my code on paper, then keyed it
| in to run.
|
| I mainly wrote basic games for my friends. Most popular was a two
| player competetive snakes variant, a bit like Tron but with
| traces only growing as you gobbled up food. I also wrote a
| 'defender' like game that enjoyed some success amongst friends.
|
| I had no periperals or cartridges as that was too expensive. The
| living room TV was my monitor. It was quite a while before I got
| a cassette tape player, so in the early days a computer session
| started by retyping all code from my notebook.
|
| I later got a ZX Spectrum which was far more powerfull, but the
| TI (and a HP41cv) are what got me into programming.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I too learned a lot from that book.
|
| It was not until years later I actually understood what I was
| doing. The little dancing guy was magic when I did it the first
| few times. Now I see it as a boring little program that loads
| up a bitmap into memory and then hangs out in a loop. I think
| the 'magic' may be gone :)
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Oh yeah. I sort of forgot. The 99/4 came with some very decent
| manuals. I remember the Extended Basic manual being a bit "meh"
| compared to the regular 99/4 manuals, but I'm probably doing it
| a disservice. It was probably still a great manual.
| mkovach wrote:
| I had one of these growing up, until it was replace with a Tandy
| 1000 from Radio Shack. Well, I kept it around until I moved into
| my second house.
|
| I had TI Forth, the huge accessory box, a disk drive, the works.
| It was fun, I learned quite a bit and have forgotten most of the
| Forth that I learned.
| abecedarius wrote:
| I had a similar setup eventually with Wycove Forth -- can't
| remember even the existence of TI Forth. Anyway playing with
| that was my foot in the door to a summer job at FORTH, Inc. as
| a teen.
|
| Lost all of that code because my 99 system got stolen a few
| years later.
| mkovach wrote:
| Oh man!
|
| I still booted my system up occasionally when I had it to
| remind myself that you didn't have to write HUGE programs to
| do stuff.
|
| Now, I want to write a text adventure game again. Where are
| my Turbo Pascal disks?
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Didn't TI-Forth have a mode where it would use a 3x7 font so
| you could get 64 characters per line? I still have
| nightmares. But... you have to appreciate the work that went
| into it.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Really if I ever knew it existed, I've forgotten. But https
| ://oratronik.de/atariage/TI_FORTH_Manual-2ndEd(LES).pdf
| says yes on page 14. General discussion at
| https://99er.net/tifaq2.html#TIFAQ011
|
| (I used Wycove Forth in 40-column mode, though I have a dim
| memory of trying something like your 3x7 font...)
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I think the TI Forth was based on L&P-83 FORTH (L&P for Laxen
| and Perry, the two authors.) I was in a friend's house in silly
| valley and met a friend-of-that-friend and started talking
| about tech. At some point I mentioned TI forth and L&P83 on the
| PC and how it was a great, simple system. He said "thank you."
| Turns out I was talking with Mike Perry.
| schlupa wrote:
| One thing TI (Extended) Basic had for it that was almost unique
| among early home computers was its use of decimal floating point
| with 13 digits precision. It was so useful for maths. I used it a
| lot at that time in high school. When I switched to an Apple II
| with its 5 byte binary floats, man was it a disappointment. It
| was faster, yes, but, boy oh boy, what a catastrophic loss of
| precision.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Yup. RADIX-100. https://www.ninerpedia.org/wiki/Radix-100
|
| I used a similar system in a 6-bit CPU I designed.
| kragen wrote:
| It seems irresponsible to put "8-bit" in the title of the
| blogpost and never mention _anywhere_ that the TI-99 /4A was a
| _16-bit_ machine.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I was going to get upset about that, but they DID say "8-bit
| era." And it was the 8-bit era. So many 6502s and Z80s.
| neuro wrote:
| This brings fun memories of being a kid in deciding which one I
| am going to pick - Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX80,
| Commodore PET, Atari 800, etc.
|
| What a diverse selection of personal computers!
| kjs3 wrote:
| Oh, alright...I'll be _that guy_. All respect to those infected
| with this particular strain of nostalgia, but I hated that piece
| of crap.
|
| I was starting to program back in those halcyon days (BASIC and
| fortunately for my later life, Fortran), so my dad got me one.
| Probably because it was cheap. Cheap it was, and slow. Like, my
| friends VIC20 seemed faster (but then, he had a floppy, more on
| that later). And the games were mostly inferior to anything on
| something like the C64. And they were games none of my friends
| had, or more importantly, my friends had games I couldn't. And
| the business apps, according to my dad, were 'just shit'.
|
| OK...I will give the thing one _huge_ props: it had a relatively
| cheap voice synthesizer "sidecar" thing, that my dad actually
| sprung for. It. Was. AWESOME. Write a little BASIC program and a
| robot voice would call your friend a 'butthead' or something. For
| a couple of days I was the most popular kid in the neighborhood
| and everyone had to see (hear) this thing. And then...they all
| went "cool man, but we're gonna go and play Fargoal or Double
| Dragon or whatever that you don't have and don't know how to
| play". So back alone with my 99/4a calling my friends 'butthead',
| but now in a sad way.
|
| But dad bought it for me to program on, so let's do that. The
| BASIC was...okay, I guess, but since it was some TI thing
| unrelated to MS BASIC used by pretty much everyone else at the
| time I couldn't compare notes with and get help from my friends
| with sane parents who had gotten their kids a C64, Atari 800 or
| TRS-80. The Logo cart was actually pretty fun, but it was also
| it's own thing and more of a toy to play with; moving the turtle
| around the screen got old quick. I probably should have gotten
| the assembler cart, but I didn't know that was probably the only
| way to really have fun programming the thing. Nut anyway...I'm a
| couple of BASIC programs in, and a floppy sure would be nice
| (read: required). Oh, you want floppy? You have to buy the giant
| expansion box, which is 5 times bigger than and costs more than
| the computer. And then buy the floppy. And probably a memory
| expansion.
|
| At this point dad realized he'd been sold a bill of goods, did
| the math, knew what a sunk cost is, and went out and bought a
| TRS-80 4P for _a lot_ more than the TI. Added CP /M, Turbo
| Pascal, 123 and Wordstar and a modem and I was off to the races.
| Got me all the way to my second year of college or so.
|
| At some point in the '90s, a buddy showed me around his new job
| (manufacturing) and we spent some time on the TI-990 minicomputer
| he was in charge of. I remember thinking "if this is what is
| possible with a 9900, they had to have worked _hard_ crippling it
| for the 99 /4a".
| abecedarius wrote:
| No argument, it was terrible. :) But still I had good times and
| started learning to program.
|
| The assembler cartridge was nearly as useless as the BASIC
| cartridge for the Atari VCS. (Not that I ever tried the latter,
| but similar problems of very limited memory holding text you'd
| typed in, the assembled program, and whatever data it's
| processing at runtime -- and needing to save to cassette tape
| before you can start on anything else.) However, the CPU
| architecture actually did give you a nice clean assembly
| language once you had enough of a system to really code in it.
|
| Being away from the mainstream... isn't an _advantage_ but I 'd
| have to call it part of my development as a programmer. I had
| to get into Forth for a reasonably powerful system.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| What do you expect for $50?
|
| And at the end of it's life, the local Base Exchange was
| selling them for $50 along with a $99 rebate voucher. The offer
| didn't last for long, though my brother scrabbled enough cash
| to buy 5 of them, got the rebate checks and wound up making
| money on the deal. But then he had 5 99/4As that he couldn't
| even give away.
|
| It was a bit of a crap-fest handicapped by bizarre corporate
| strategies from TI and a "baroque" internal architecture. But
| it was DURT CHEAP compared to "real" computers like PCs/clones,
| Apple ][s or CP/M devices.
|
| (Not arguing with the fact that in 1983 when TI pulled out of
| the market, it was clear it was ready to move to a computer
| farm upstate. But none of us knew any better in '79 when the
| 99/4 was originally released. And besides, BILL COSBY was the
| spokes-person, so it COULDN'T be a bad machine!)
| indymike wrote:
| Like a lot of people here, I learned to program on a 99/4A before
| moving to a PC. The 99/4A was actually great, but looking back
| very primitive. TI-Basic -> Extended Basic -> Assembly. When I
| got to the PC, I missed hardware sprites and a real sound chip (a
| sound card for a PC cost $300 at the time - about $100 more than
| my TI cost my Dad!).
|
| It always amazed me that the 99/4A had such a vibrant community
| (that is still creating hardware and software around the machine)
| and so many outlandish ways to expand the machine.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I have one. It was the first computer that was completely mine.
|
| I was disappointed in what the embedded basic could give me...it
| was slow, it had sprite-only graphics exposed (couldn't draw a
| vector from X,Y to X,Y) and my parents only bought touch typing
| tutor.
|
| and in my boredom, I'd slot and pull the cartridge which made it
| do -interesting- things...dumping memory space to what would
| eventually be called a frame buffer...and when it did, it would
| show cycling bitmaps at a much higher speed than you'd ever be
| able to do with Basic.
|
| So you could see the potential, but a 12 year old with nothing
| but a tape drive and one cartridge couldn't and didn't know how
| to touch it.
|
| And 4 months after spending $350 for it, Sears was closing them
| out for $50. Which was why, a few years later, when I wanted an
| Amiga, Dad bought an XT clone. It's support and software
| cpabilities was much improved over the TI.
| krunck wrote:
| the 99/4A was my first real computer. I was 8 or 9 at the time.
| Programming ensued. Sprites were magic.
| lproven wrote:
| I used TI99/4As at school in the Isle of Man at age 16 or so. I
| thought they were sad, rather crippled things then. Horribly
| slow, limited BASIC, and the school didn't have Extended BASIC
| cartridges.
|
| I still wonder... Could TI have made a non-crippled TI99 at the
| time that wouldn't have been vastly more expensive?
|
| I know there was the planned, prototyped, and cancelled TI99/8:
|
| http://www.99er.net/998art.html
|
| http://www.99er.net/998.html
|
| 64kB RAM, Extended BASIC as standard, expandable to 15MB.
|
| But that would have cost a fortune at the time.
|
| I'm just wondering if a TI99/4 with 32kB of RAM _attached
| directly to the CPU_ and maybe a better BASIC would have been
| achievable for not much more?
|
| The 99/8 never shipped but the Geneve 9640 shows what the
| architecture could do.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneve_9640
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Somewhere I read a story about a group of TI sales engineers in
| Britain who put together a much more "typical" micro-computer
| system using the 9940 or 9980 CPU. They, of course, lost out
| the the 99/4 design because of politics. Though to be fair,
| I've heard there was A LOT of confusion over the 99/4's
| requirements. It supposedly started as a video game console
| after the Atari VCS was released to great acclaim in '77. But
| by the time they released it they decided they wanted to
| compete with the personal computing trinity: Apple ][, TRS-80
| and Commodore PET.
|
| I think it was certainly possible for SOMEONE to have come up
| with a better design targeting the nascent PC market. Also
| remember the 99/4 was pretty cheap compared to "real"
| computers. A typical CP/M or Apple ][ machine would have cost
| somewhere around $2500-$3500 in 1979. The 99/4 was a "bargain"
| at $1150. You have to think a 9900-based system that had a
| front-panel, floppy disk, RS-232 interface like contemporary
| CP/M machines wouldn't have cost too much more than a CP/M
| device. It may be a scratch more expensive cause you would
| likely want a bit more memory than the 16k that was common in
| the Altair or IMSAI machines at the time.
|
| Every now and again 99/8 prototype systems will surface on eBay
| and sell for THOUSANDS of dollars. I just saw a CC-40 Plus
| system go for about $3500. Alas, I can't really justify that
| many dollars for these old systems. When TI got out of the
| business, they had the 99/8 and CC-70 in development. Assuming
| they were able to sell them for a decent price, they couldn't
| have been as bad at the 99/4 and CC-40.
| drawkward wrote:
| This is where my programming journey began! Somewhere, tucked
| away in a scrapbook, is a handwritten set of BASIC instructions I
| wrote around 1983 when I would have been about 6 (probably for an
| Apple IIe, not this computer).
|
| My dad bought it with the stated intent of writing a program that
| would display ASCII art associated with a keypress, to help me
| learn the alphabet and reading (e.g., pressing "A" would have
| brought up an ascii art apple). He claimed that he was only able
| to make it halfway through the alphabet before running out of
| storage on the cassette tape.
|
| He would later go on to be a sysadmin at Cleveland FreeNet (as a
| hobby), and in the early 1980s was the first principal to put a
| "computer lab" in our local high school.
|
| I have many fond memories of playing Munch Man (and, I think,
| Parsec) on this home computer.
| aghilmort wrote:
| Top 5 faves as a kid
|
| anything 6502 SBC -- hex code / assembly, later BASIC, etc. Timex
| Sinclair -- disabled screen for run so CPU could save screen code
| cycles TRS-80 CoCo -- poke 65535,65536, 65537 -- clock 1x,
| overclock 2x, 3x TI99/4a -- sprites + cartridges + accessible PC
| Jr + Turbo Pascal -- first compiler in
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| The 99/4 & 4A have such a great place in my heart. One of my
| uncles worked for TI (he was the exec sponsor for the Speak &
| Spell.) My mom had a LINC for a while and my dad bought a TRS-80
| when it came out. So when the 99/4 was about to be released, we
| got the full court press from my uncle: there's a new 16 bit
| computer with color and sound and all sorts of cool features.
|
| So we bought a 99/4. Pretty sure we got the friends and family
| discount. Many don't remember the original 99/4 released in '79,
| but it was definitely a weird beast. In retrospect it was very
| clear TI couldn't decide whether it was a console gaming system
| to compete with the Atari VCS or a personal computer to compete
| with the Atari 800, Apple ][, TRS-80 or Commodore PET.
| Peripherals were originally (large) boxes that chained off the
| side of the main unit. We had a speech synthesizer, memory
| expansion, RS-232 interface and floppy controller, so we wound up
| buying a special cable to let us move the chain to a different
| part of the desk.
|
| To a modern audience, the most interesting part of the confusion
| between being a personal computer or game console might have been
| TI's attitude towards 3rd party software developers. If you
| wanted to write software for the 99/4, the first thing they
| wanted you to do was to give them $10k. And this was back in the
| late 70s, when $10k was a chunk of change. Companies like Milton-
| Bradley ponied up the cash for a license and a dev system (which
| I think was a $25k 990 system.) I wrote a couple games for the
| Apple ][, put floppies in a zip-lock and sold them through the
| local ByteShop. I think I sold 10 copies. For a kid in Jr. High,
| the $50 in profit I made was real money. I could not even
| conceive of where I would get $10k for a license to make anything
| for the 99/4.
|
| In '81, TI released an upgraded version called the 99/4A, which
| was mostly identical, but had the upgraded video chip (the 9918A
| vs the 9918) and lower case characters (actually small caps, but
| who cares.) Even though there was plenty of data to suggest this
| Nintendo-esque approach to 3rd party software was more of a games
| console thing than a personal computer thing, TI stuck with it. I
| think the beige models of the 99/4A that started coming out in
| '83 before they exited the market included scrambled entry-points
| to various OS calls to make it harder for people to make
| unlicensed software (didn't AtariSoft run afoul of this? or maybe
| it was ActiVision. I know one of the "big names" didn't want to
| pay for the license and thus didn't get the "secret" information
| about how to properly call I/O functions on the beige machines.)
|
| My uncle participated in researching a book on TI's corporate
| history in the late 90s / early 2000s. I helped him out a bit and
| one day called the main corporate library asking for any public
| info they might have on the 99/4. They claimed TI never made a
| machine called the 99/4 or 99/4A and I must be thinking about the
| TI-84 calculator. Maybe they just wanted to forget the whole
| thing or maybe I had reached the calculator library. In any
| event, most of the people I talked with who were involved in the
| project thought it was a failure and don't seem to want to share
| their memories. This is kinda sad. I loved my little 99/4, quirks
| and all.
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