Wanting to time travel within his own lifetime, Ben Heck, stepped into the quantum leap accelerator and vanished.
3 года назад+5
Ahh, the memories! I grew up with this computer. With a 32k memory expansion and disk drives it was actually quite a joy to use... not in the built in TI Basic though. Extended Basic cartridge was plugged in most of the time, or Editor Assembler to run TI Forth, oh man that was fun! You did not even begin to scratch the surface of the weirdness this computer is. It had a GPL interpreter in ROM, Graphic Programming Language. TI Basic was written in GPL, so any Basic program is interpreted twice, and the only memory available to Basic is in VRAM. Since Basic programs are stored in VRAM, you could not use the full resolution of the graphics chip, since it would need all VRAM to do that. The only 16-bit ram is the 256 bytes on the mother board, the expansion bus was multiplexed to 8-bit, so when attaching 32k memory expansion it is accessed as 8-bit ram. Most program cartridges was written in GPL stored in TI's proprietary GROM memory, with a few exception where they needed more speed. The game "Parsec" was one of them. I had a lot of fun tinkering with the 99, and learned a lot!
I still have impressions on my thumb from turning it on/off. I can still hear the cassette tape sounds. I learned hexadecimal to program sprites. The multichannel sound, which could be programmed in basic, was amazing on this machine. I made some magical loops that created never-ending rising tones before I knew what they were called.
I had one (Still have one console in the basement, stored away). I had the expansion box. With extended basic cartridge, 32K ram card in Ex Box, Third party disk controller, 2 DS/DD 5 1/4 Floppies. Had 2 serial and parallel ports, you could do quite a bit. I also had the speech module. The math was much more accurate then the competitors. TI Extended Basic was just like fortran at the time. Only difference was the line numbers. I was a an engineering student at the time, and did my fortran programming on the TI. Like fortran, you had to declare variables, had local and global variables. It was so close to fortran, that I wrote my code and debugged on the TI. Then I printed out the program, and went to schooll and typed in line by line on the punch card machine. Stripped the line numbers, except for the goto's. Program ran perfectly on the Schools mainframe. The other home PC's could not touch it in this regards. The math accuracy was so much better than the others, when solving matrices, I always got accurate results if I didn't screw up the code. I created a program to assist me in designing tube and shell heat exchangers. I also wrote programs to design duct work, and a few other tasks for school. The teacher required us to turn in the code, to prove we didn't use commercial code (though commercial code wasn't available then. Got A's in all those classes. The other cumbersome program was TI writer. It had 2 parts, and editor and a compiler. No wysiwig. You wrote a text page. Line breaks, returns, printer commands all imbedded in your text. Then you compiled it. If you were lucky, it printed out the way you thought it might. I got good at it. I actually did a 2 column newsletter by setting margins on the printer, first for left side, then right, ran the paper through twice. Seemed amazing back then, but so crude compared to what is done today. The TI keyboard you have has gold contacts and the key switches were from cash registers. Very durable. Later ones were "valued engineered" to plastic crap, the early ones were chiclet keys, terrible.
Thanks for sharing your story! I really wish that the ti99/4a got more love, because it fought fairly well against the competition. Too bad that 3rd party developers had a hard time dealing with texas to sell software, that's probably one of the main reasons it died off too.
@@zbdot73 it's interesting, you have to press "FCTN" along with "S" to move back a character, and to delete the currently selected character press "FCTN" with "1". so FCTN+S moves the cursor back, and FCTN+1 deletes the selected character. Along with FCTN... E, S, D, and X moves the cursor in the directions up, left, right, and down.
I used to watch Dallas with my Wife. Then JR got shot which I thought was great but then they brought him back and it was all a dream. I never watched another episode.
This isn't a Linus Tech Tips video, you've not tried to advertise something in the first ten seconds. And you've yet to drop the item you're putting together ;-)
@@BenHeckHacks but what if I need a VPN like right now!? or need to know what kind of cheap video game to spend money on whatever their in-game currency is!?
I LOVE that computer, it was my first! Someone is working up an open source updated version of it that's going to have USB, SD cards and separate boards for video, memory etc so people can mess with it.
The "blah-blah-blah" portion of the theme song to "Texas Atheist Vegan Crossfitter" exists not because Ben couldn't think of more lyrics, but because that's what the Texas Atheist Vegan Crossfitter is literally saying 😆
Had one of these for many years, I think the biggest reason it bombed so badly was that It was almost completely useless without the expansion bay. The TI expansion bay was a loud monstrosity that required you to buy more expansion cards before it was terribly useful and only had DSSD disk controllers available until other folks like CorComp made DSDD controllers. CorComp also made their own expansion box, a box about twice the size of the speech synthesizer, completely silent, and was IMO superior to the TI expansion bay. There were a number of hobbyists producing controllers for hard drives, PCMCIA cards, 3.5 inch floppy drives, and other random accessories in the late 90s and early 00s... but most of those projects seem to have died out in the early to mid 00s shortly before my grandfather passed away who was one of only a few remaining members of a socal users group that had been around since the mid 80s. The real prize if you can find one is the TI 99/5(aka 99/4b)... integrated speech synthesizer, more ram, and a bump in clock speeds from 3MHz to 10MHz. If memory serves it had 48K of memory and a spot to add 64K more, however the dram controller and the code to access it was never finished so adding the memory didn't actually do anything. It was rumored to have a built in printer port, but the one I used didn't have it. It also had a feature to SLOW it back down to 3MHz for games.... very useful unless you like playing Alpiner at 3x normal speed. ;-) There was a TI-99/8 rumored which had even more memory along with having PASCAL built in... but I never actually saw or used one so dunno..... There were also a couple of third party TI-994A compatible "computers" you could get. My favorite was the Geneve 9640, essentially a TI-994A on an expansion card that fit into the TI expansion bay.... among other enhancements it included was 640KB of ram if memory serves. One of the user group members had one and loved to show it off at meetings, it got a little old after a while like a rich douche bag showing off his Porsche except this guy would let us play with it, so that was nice.
The TI99/4a was actually the very first computer I used, way back in 1982-83. Took an after school course that taught us how to program in BASIC (I still have the worksheets from that course!) and likely what started my passion for computers in general! It was just the concept of using a fancy "typewriter" that put things on screen, and with some commands, I could make it do all sorts of interesting things. Ended up buying an Apple II Plus, then a 16-bit IIGS and eventually a DOS/Windows PC. Years later I collected all sorts of other machines (C64, VIC20, CoCo 3, Amiga, Atari ST, Sinclair, Macs, Apple III, etc) but still yearning to go back and play with the machine that started it all for me....the TI99/4a. Hope one day to fine one to add to my collection.
I bought one a TI99 a day before they were discontinued. It was great to learn programming in the early days. About 5 years ago I visited the British Science Museum and there was one on display.... Am i that old?
The TI-99/4A was my first computer. I recently spent some time on building an accessory board for the TRS-80 Model 1 that uses the video chip and sound chip from the TI-99/4A.
As for "why did they do that" with the sad 256 bytes of SRAM... The original design for the 99/4 was using a TMS9985 processor. It was basically the 8088 to the TMS9900's 8086(cheaper, with an 8-bit bus.) Since the 9900 architecture required fast SRAM(registers are stored in RAM, not on-chip), the 9985 would've had 256 bytes of internal SRAM. But the TMS9985 never went into production( due to yield problems, as I understand things). The home computer division redesigned the board to use a full-size TMS9900 plucked straight out of the TI-990 minicomputer line and just put the 16-to-8 multiplexers on the board, and added 256 bytes of SRAM alongside it to make it work and guarantee compatibility with the existing design and software. Essentially building a TMS9985 out of discrete components. With the project having been plagued by delays and setbacks almost from the word go(I gather the 99/4 was over a year behind schedule when it launched), and the sudden transplant of a TMS9900 driving costs up, they opted not to make a more significant redesign. The 99/4a would be an incremental improvement(full-travel keyboard, lowercase text support, change from the TMS9918 to TMS9918A to get that sweet bitmap display mode). And then the entire home computer division in all it's unlucky and mismanaged glory was shut down to stop it from bleeding more red ink all over TI's books, shortly before the significantly-improved 99/8 would have launched. (Seriously, the home computer department was hella unlucky. Just about everything that could go wrong did.)
It's even a little worse than that. It's like they planned to run out of space knowing they had to use bus bars for the triple voltage rails (5V, -5V, 12V), and then encountered dead-ends anyway. Some of the pins of the bus bars don't go anywhere because they trapped themselves in. Hence the 3 bodge wires to carry the voltages. You might get a kick out of the excess use of inductors near the motherboard power input. Failed FCC, add inductor, fail, add another, are we good? No add another. What? We still failed, add another. What we actually passed? Ship it. The first rev board (the silver and black unit) is a cool relic, many of those "resistors" are actually capacitors. The crinkled copper foil from wave soldering. The lack of soldermask between IC pins. 12 volts to ruin your week if your test leads slip.
I have had some boards from a german company named Hommelwerke that I took out of an Industrial machine, there was about 20 boards inside with a lot of digital and analog stuff. Two of the 20 boards have this TI CPU in the nice ceramic white case and those two boards also have bus bars, I never found out why. The rest of the boards have nothing like this on it even them with ROM, RAM and all the D/A parts. I just check my video where I show some of those boards and it look like the bars are hooked up to the RAM. The video was not suposed to show this boards, they was to test a camera. Their are some clear shots of the bars in this unit they are made by mektron. ruclips.net/video/jVfSl0CjI14/видео.html&ab_channel=ts.electronics So my guess it has something to do with the RAM on those TI CPU's. Never seen them before or in anything else.
I've seen these bars before in arcade equipment. I thought the were bus bars, but the were actually some weird kind of bus film capacitor. May be with same with these.
I got one of these for my 9th birthday. Loved playing Hunt the Wumpus and Tombstone City on it. Programming graphics with the sprite system was a lot of fun. Backing up programs to cassette tape was a pain.
I had a TI 99 4a when I was a kid and I loved it! My parents bought it brand new and had a good amount of add ons and a lot of games. Then later I got a complete Commodore 64 system. Monitor, printer, two disk drives, and I had a stupid amount of software. Sadly like 15 years ago, my mom threw them both out thinking they weren't worth anything anymore because they were both just sitting in storage in her basement. I found out about 10 years ago and not going to lie, I cried a lot and so did she when I showed her how much they are worth now days. I want to replace them but people want an arm and a leg for them now. 😢
That was the first "computer" I bought, in 1985! I still have it. The "cartridges" with programs were incompatible with everything else, except Klingon technology!
I found one of these in a Montreal thrift shop, but I only ever hear of them being popular up in the Southern US or Europe. *Side note, you can do some crazy expansion to this thing with a sidecar.
@namuzed - Was that recently? The last time I saw one--actually a whole pile of them, was the warehouse-sized Salvation Army store formerly on the corner of Norte-Dame and Guy. This was in the mid-90's and they were only $1 each, and yeah, kicking myself for not buying one! I did see one before the pandemic at the GOT-JUNK store at Ville Saint-Pierre, but it had no powersupply, untested and they wanted far more than it was worth. Still looking for one, the TI99/4a was the very first computer I used, back in the early 80's. I still have the booklet with BASIC programming I used when I was just 10 years old, from an after school thing my parents sent me to.
These computers had Plug and Play long before Microsoft even thought of Windows. The console OS only knew about what was in the console, rather than trying to include support for every possible addon and upgrade. It had a space in the memory map with "ports" where on powerup it would search for "Device Service Routine" or DSR from peripherals. The DSRs were in ROM chips in each peripheral. They were the drivers for the hardware and provided function calls to BASIC and other programming languages. Without a disk expansion, typing SAVE DSK1.FILENAME without a disk system would produce an error message because without the disk controller *there is no disk control code in the system*. This was a supremely brilliant design feature. It has made it possible for people to create many peripherals unimaginable to the people who designed this computer. Whatever anyone wants to make to upgrade it can be made to work if they can write a DSR that essentially tells the console "Here I am! Here are the words that make me function!" and document how to access its functions and features with various programming languages, or if it's something like a printer, a new storage device etc, the total functionality may be contained within the DSR and it'll "Just Work". Assume someone made a USB 1.1 card for the expansion box. They might give it the device name USB1 so with the card plugged in saving to USB would be as easy as SAVE USB1.FILENAME and loading it back would be OLD USB1.FILENAME Yes, OLD = LOAD. No idea why TI used OLD instead of LOAD like *all other micros*. This sort of 'infinite extendability' should have become the way to design operating systems so that hardware would contain its own drivers in fast access storage onboard, and simply connecting new peripherals would be all that's needed to install them, and disconnecting them would make it like they were never there.
When TI had their fire sale, my dad bought two of these. At one point we had a stack of five of them, and cartridges a-plenty. We even had the thing on CompuServe back in the days of 300 baud modems and CompuServe.
I owned this computer for about a year and a half. I had the speech module and a number of games on cartridge: Chess and Parsec. Sold it when saw the C64 and it was just so much faster than this, despite only being 8bit lol! Still, I enjoyed my time with it though. Thanks for the memories, Ben!
I think the video chip had 8-bit data bus, which meant that the computer had to access the video chip multiple times to get a full 16-bit word from the 16K RAM. Also, it seems like TI BASIC was written in virtual machine language(GPL), and virtual machine itself was stored on the graphics ROM(I'm not sure if CPU was able to execute directly from the ROM, or maybe CPU had to copy to the RAM?). No wonder why it was so slow.
Ah, the first coimputer I ever had. A friend of my dad's sold us one, with a small collection of game cartridges, including TI's version of Space Invaders, their version of Pac-Man, a chess game, and a few others. If you wanted to save programs you had written in BASIC, you had to buy a separate tape cassette recorder.
Oh boy! I miss the one I had, with the voice synthesis module and the game Alpiner. I also remember a fame called Hunt the Wumpus, but couldn't ever figure it out.
I still have mine, working with the expansion box, floppy drives, speech synthesizer, game cartridges, various peripherals and other paraphernalia. Still love the old military spec chips and elsewhat used in it.
@Ben Heck Hacks: The 9900 was a memory-to-memory single chip version of the TMS 990 minicomputer architecture. This essentially meant that the chip itself doesn't have discrete registers, but rather uses RAM for that purpose. These are the dual 6810 SRAMs you see, and were in fact, a screwy compromise (the original machine was supposed to have a version of the 9900, the 9985, which had an 8-bit data bus, and DRAM refresh circuitry) It needs at a minimum, 128 words of memory to handle 8 seperate workspace pages that can be swapped out with the workspace pointer register. As it turns out, during normal operation of the computer, this RAM is almost completely used by the code running in the ROMS, which implement an interpreter called Graphics Programming Language (GPL), which was literally TI's solution to their hamstrung architecture problem, with GPL they could put all of the RAM on the video bus, and create a simpler programming language that, while it did mimic the machine code, it was very screen oriented, and was mean to get visual displays up very quickly. The software itself ran on very oddball ROMs with incremental offset addressing called GROMs, and the video ram would essentially be called GRAM. The BASIC itself was written in GPL, and thus, if you think about it, was double-interpreted, BASIC tokens would be turned into GPL instructions in GRAM, which would call BASIC routines in GROM. This is why the built-in BASIC is painfully slow, and only supports the built in 16K of RAM. The majority of software development at TI was done on TI 990/10 systems running DX10, cross compiling GPL code to development systems that had GRAM boards on an umbellicus that connected to the target system. TI really didn't want third parties writing software for the system. Over the years, loyal hackers have learned to embrace and extend the sheer weirdness of this system to do amazing things, and TI and others made excellent expansions that made the computer very useful. Ultimately, it was a never ending string of bone-headed NIH decisions that killed this machine.
The TI 99/4A was our family computer back in 82. I loved it, but didnt know any better. Games on carts, and tape drive for most other software, plus writing programs. "Hunt the Wumpus" was my favorite game. I remember the salesman convinced us that we only needed the cheaper monochrome monitor.... then 6 months later I bought a color monitor. I think that was the salesman plan all along. In 84, we got the C64, and never touched the TI again. It wasnt a bad computer, but TI cut too many corners. I think they were competeing with the Vic20, but it was too late for that
14:00 "Ben Heck Karaoke Time!" Theme from The Greatest American Hero (Believe It or Not) sung by Joey Scarbury. In this edition, not only does Ben pick an awesome song, he fully commits every ounce of effort in this 100% note for note cover tune! 😆👍
Funny thing, back in the day when I was a kid, my dad bought one of these, and I think when I was 2 or 3, I looked at the keyboard, and it didn't make sense to me, so I took all the keys off and put them in the right order (alphabetical). Let's just say my parents weren't as proud of me as I thought they would be, so they told me to fix it. I took all the keys back off, went in to the text editor, pressed where each key went, and put the correct one there. I think that's what got me started in an IT career... lol I also remember having a poker game, but never understood how to play it :-)
I remember seeing the TI99/4A in a few shops in the UK, circa 1981. But never knew anyone who actually bought one though. Unlike Sinclair, Commodore, etc.
The other smaller chip with a heat sink near the crystal is a four-phase clock generator. TI engineers knew the TMS9900 was a 12 Volt dinosaur, which is why their managers had them go with GPL (much like .NET bytecode was decades later). TI's intention was to switch to a much cheaper 8 bit CPU, but those plans never materialized as it was constantly delayed (and failed). Using GPL bytecode, TI would only have to pay Microsoft once to develop the BASIC interpreter. Plus GPL also made those command modules (cartridges) cheaper because of more compact 8-bit VM instructions instead of 16-bit native assembly.
Actually, the 4A had 2 processors. The main CPU is 8-bit, the GPU is 16-bit. Which means when you write a Mandelbrot fractal demo, the GPU will process it faster than with the CPU. The video chip from the 4A was used in MSX computers and in Coleco's ADAM / Colecovision. I owned 3 of these things, with Advanced BASIC and speech synthesizer, something Texas Instruments really promoted. I never got the expansion unit with disk drives. Oddly enough, a local technical college had a bunch of them. If you're not impressed with the 99/4A, look up the Dragon's Lair cartridge some guy made for it!
My first computer. I did not have the tape recorder cable for storage so I spent many hours typing in BASIC game programs from Compute! Magazine only to power off and lose it all after wards. I eventually got the data transfer cable and used my good ol Realistic brand cassette tape recorder. Ahh..simpler times.
TI BASIC is an ANSI-compliant BASIC interpreter, based on Dartmouth BASIC, with additions for graphics, sound, and file system access. Unlike most BASICs, only one statement is allowed per source line.
I did a video comparing the TI99/4A and the VIC-20, and one of the crazy things was how much faster the VIC-20 was with BASIC. I had both count to 10,000 and the TI was still running after I restarted the VIC-20 program like five times. The Basic is so slow without some of the enhancement cartridges. The graphics could be lovely, though.
I owned one of these in the early 80s and had hours of fun programming in TI Basic with its cassette recorder memory, 14K of ram about the same as the Apollo computers only 10 years earlier. they invented the pocket calculator with LED display costing around $50, about a decade before. They also made most of the first susussful intergrated circuits and op amps.
Bill Cosby did endorse this. I have all the original material and box and everything, and there's a software catalog with Mr. Cosby posing on the front
Quantum Leap by Mike Post, Dallas Theme Song by Jerrold Immell. Took a while for this old boomer to figure that last one. Loved Quantum Leap. Mike Post is the King of TV Theme.
why the artic silver thermal paste continues, when at the moment there are much higher thermal pastes artic mx4, thermal grizzly kryonaut, gc extrem ...... etc etc
After they stopped production and were selling off remaining stock, my parents bought us one of these for $49 at K-Mart, I believe. As a computer it was pretty sucky. As a game console, it was pretty great. Get some carts and a joystick for it, and you'll be in business.
I've got 5 or 6 of these... 3 of them in the box and two not only like new but one still has the paperwork that came in the box which includes a card with a listing of repair centers to send these to if needed. One is close to where I live so I took a trip there and alas... it's not there anymore, lol. I have a couple of the voice synthesizer modules too.
I remember my friend’s grandma pulling the later “cost reduction” beige TI99/4A down from the closet in the early 90s for us to play with, definitely a distant, distant 4th behind the Apple II, Commodore 64 & Atari 8-bit computers
The best part of Ben's singing is the lack of copyright strikes.
For now. Just wait until the algorithm starts going after singing and humming.
@@GaugePlays1980 pretty sure Ben is safe from any automated content identification. Human powered one as well, for that manner.
Wanting to time travel within his own lifetime, Ben Heck, stepped into the quantum leap accelerator and vanished.
Ahh, the memories! I grew up with this computer. With a 32k memory expansion and disk drives it was actually quite a joy to use... not in the built in TI Basic though. Extended Basic cartridge was plugged in most of the time, or Editor Assembler to run TI Forth, oh man that was fun!
You did not even begin to scratch the surface of the weirdness this computer is. It had a GPL interpreter in ROM, Graphic Programming Language. TI Basic was written in GPL, so any Basic program is interpreted twice, and the only memory available to Basic is in VRAM.
Since Basic programs are stored in VRAM, you could not use the full resolution of the graphics chip, since it would need all VRAM to do that.
The only 16-bit ram is the 256 bytes on the mother board, the expansion bus was multiplexed to 8-bit, so when attaching 32k memory expansion it is accessed as 8-bit ram.
Most program cartridges was written in GPL stored in TI's proprietary GROM memory, with a few exception where they needed more speed. The game "Parsec" was one of them.
I had a lot of fun tinkering with the 99, and learned a lot!
Interesting read. thanks for your cool insight into your pc!
I still have impressions on my thumb from turning it on/off. I can still hear the cassette tape sounds. I learned hexadecimal to program sprites. The multichannel sound, which could be programmed in basic, was amazing on this machine. I made some magical loops that created never-ending rising tones before I knew what they were called.
With each video, we see Ben become further disconnected from reality. Lucky guy.
18:50
It's the lead based solder, trust me, I know from experience lol ;)
I had one (Still have one console in the basement, stored away). I had the expansion box. With extended basic cartridge, 32K ram card in Ex Box, Third party disk controller, 2 DS/DD 5 1/4 Floppies. Had 2 serial and parallel ports, you could do quite a bit. I also had the speech module. The math was much more accurate then the competitors. TI Extended Basic was just like fortran at the time. Only difference was the line numbers. I was a an engineering student at the time, and did my fortran programming on the TI. Like fortran, you had to declare variables, had local and global variables. It was so close to fortran, that I wrote my code and debugged on the TI. Then I printed out the program, and went to schooll and typed in line by line on the punch card machine. Stripped the line numbers, except for the goto's. Program ran perfectly on the Schools mainframe. The other home PC's could not touch it in this regards. The math accuracy was so much better than the others, when solving matrices, I always got accurate results if I didn't screw up the code. I created a program to assist me in designing tube and shell heat exchangers. I also wrote programs to design duct work, and a few other tasks for school. The teacher required us to turn in the code, to prove we didn't use commercial code (though commercial code wasn't available then. Got A's in all those classes. The other cumbersome program was TI writer. It had 2 parts, and editor and a compiler. No wysiwig. You wrote a text page. Line breaks, returns, printer commands all imbedded in your text. Then you compiled it. If you were lucky, it printed out the way you thought it might. I got good at it. I actually did a 2 column newsletter by setting margins on the printer, first for left side, then right, ran the paper through twice. Seemed amazing back then, but so crude compared to what is done today.
The TI keyboard you have has gold contacts and the key switches were from cash registers. Very durable. Later ones were "valued engineered" to plastic crap, the early ones were chiclet keys, terrible.
Thanks for sharing your story! I really wish that the ti99/4a got more love, because it fought fairly well against the competition. Too bad that 3rd party developers had a hard time dealing with texas to sell software, that's probably one of the main reasons it died off too.
so how do you do a backspace on a TI?
@@zbdot73 it's interesting, you have to press "FCTN" along with "S" to move back a character, and to delete the currently selected character press "FCTN" with "1". so FCTN+S moves the cursor back, and FCTN+1 deletes the selected character. Along with FCTN... E, S, D, and X moves the cursor in the directions up, left, right, and down.
To this day the Dallas and Falcon Crest themes make me want to just go to my room and read since they meant TV was about to get super boring.
God yes. My parents always watched Dallas and I'm like YAWN!
The only things I know about Dallas are that someone shot J.R. and it brought down communism in Romania.
I used to watch Dallas with my Wife. Then JR got shot which I thought was great but then they brought him back and it was all a dream. I never watched another episode.
My parents and I watched it in England. And JR stole my Dad's band.
After he got shot, he should have awoken in Jeannie's bottle!
This isn't a Linus Tech Tips video, you've not tried to advertise something in the first ten seconds. And you've yet to drop the item you're putting together ;-)
I'm planning a "Manly MAN soap" fake ad to slap in a video eventually.
@@BenHeckHacks but what if I need a VPN like right now!? or need to know what kind of cheap video game to spend money on whatever their in-game currency is!?
AS5 Silver... you won't ever see THAT on LTT. Only quantum foam gluten-free TIM will do.
It's not a Linus Tech Tips video because he reasonably knows what he's doing.
I LOVE that computer, it was my first! Someone is working up an open source updated version of it that's going to have USB, SD cards and separate boards for video, memory etc so people can mess with it.
I hope this episode spawns another music video a la Kitten Jail. Let's make element14 jealous that they don't have this quality content.
The "blah-blah-blah" portion of the theme song to "Texas Atheist Vegan Crossfitter" exists not because Ben couldn't think of more lyrics, but because that's what the Texas Atheist Vegan Crossfitter is literally saying 😆
Had one of these for many years, I think the biggest reason it bombed so badly was that It was almost completely useless without the expansion bay. The TI expansion bay was a loud monstrosity that required you to buy more expansion cards before it was terribly useful and only had DSSD disk controllers available until other folks like CorComp made DSDD controllers. CorComp also made their own expansion box, a box about twice the size of the speech synthesizer, completely silent, and was IMO superior to the TI expansion bay.
There were a number of hobbyists producing controllers for hard drives, PCMCIA cards, 3.5 inch floppy drives, and other random accessories in the late 90s and early 00s... but most of those projects seem to have died out in the early to mid 00s shortly before my grandfather passed away who was one of only a few remaining members of a socal users group that had been around since the mid 80s.
The real prize if you can find one is the TI 99/5(aka 99/4b)... integrated speech synthesizer, more ram, and a bump in clock speeds from 3MHz to 10MHz. If memory serves it had 48K of memory and a spot to add 64K more, however the dram controller and the code to access it was never finished so adding the memory didn't actually do anything. It was rumored to have a built in printer port, but the one I used didn't have it. It also had a feature to SLOW it back down to 3MHz for games.... very useful unless you like playing Alpiner at 3x normal speed. ;-)
There was a TI-99/8 rumored which had even more memory along with having PASCAL built in... but I never actually saw or used one so dunno.....
There were also a couple of third party TI-994A compatible "computers" you could get. My favorite was the Geneve 9640, essentially a TI-994A on an expansion card that fit into the TI expansion bay.... among other enhancements it included was 640KB of ram if memory serves. One of the user group members had one and loved to show it off at meetings, it got a little old after a while like a rich douche bag showing off his Porsche except this guy would let us play with it, so that was nice.
I lusted after one of those bad boys back in the day!
My best friend had one, with the voice module. I had a VIC20.
I was considering getting one, thank God I bought an Atari 400.
3:50 Sharpie abuse!
I admire that you took the time to get the mismatched words right on every go of texas athiest vegan crossfitter on your editing game.
Brought to you today by "that's weird!"
Also: Singing + solder-sucker, RUclips gold.
I’d like to see a “For All Mankind” storyline where the TI 99 was the successful instead of Apple or IBM.
Tough times in these days of Covid, but we all need to try and look after our mental health...What the hell Ben? This video is mental.
The TI99/4a was actually the very first computer I used, way back in 1982-83. Took an after school course that taught us how to program in BASIC (I still have the worksheets from that course!) and likely what started my passion for computers in general! It was just the concept of using a fancy "typewriter" that put things on screen, and with some commands, I could make it do all sorts of interesting things. Ended up buying an Apple II Plus, then a 16-bit IIGS and eventually a DOS/Windows PC. Years later I collected all sorts of other machines (C64, VIC20, CoCo 3, Amiga, Atari ST, Sinclair, Macs, Apple III, etc) but still yearning to go back and play with the machine that started it all for me....the TI99/4a. Hope one day to fine one to add to my collection.
I bought one a TI99 a day before they were discontinued. It was great to learn programming in the early days. About 5 years ago I visited the British Science Museum and there was one on display.... Am i that old?
The TI-99/4A was my first computer. I recently spent some time on building an accessory board for the TRS-80 Model 1 that uses the video chip and sound chip from the TI-99/4A.
15:30 The ghost of Larry Hagman just issued a copyright strike.
It's ok. The whole thing turned out to be a dream.
Appropriate, since we're talking Texas.
12:30 That’s a GROM. It’s a type of memory that was used essentially for locking out non TI assembly language.
retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/8700/what-was-the-purpose-of-grom-vs-rom-in-the-ti-99-4a
As for "why did they do that" with the sad 256 bytes of SRAM...
The original design for the 99/4 was using a TMS9985 processor. It was basically the 8088 to the TMS9900's 8086(cheaper, with an 8-bit bus.) Since the 9900 architecture required fast SRAM(registers are stored in RAM, not on-chip), the 9985 would've had 256 bytes of internal SRAM. But the TMS9985 never went into production( due to yield problems, as I understand things).
The home computer division redesigned the board to use a full-size TMS9900 plucked straight out of the TI-990 minicomputer line and just put the 16-to-8 multiplexers on the board, and added 256 bytes of SRAM alongside it to make it work and guarantee compatibility with the existing design and software. Essentially building a TMS9985 out of discrete components. With the project having been plagued by delays and setbacks almost from the word go(I gather the 99/4 was over a year behind schedule when it launched), and the sudden transplant of a TMS9900 driving costs up, they opted not to make a more significant redesign.
The 99/4a would be an incremental improvement(full-travel keyboard, lowercase text support, change from the TMS9918 to TMS9918A to get that sweet bitmap display mode). And then the entire home computer division in all it's unlucky and mismanaged glory was shut down to stop it from bleeding more red ink all over TI's books, shortly before the significantly-improved 99/8 would have launched.
(Seriously, the home computer department was hella unlucky. Just about everything that could go wrong did.)
the madison goodwill workers..."oh its that guy that buys nothing but TI calculators and tripods"
Wait a minute, it can’t be that guy. He also buys casios!
9:00 Power or ground bus bar for when the PCB designer ran out of routing space.
It's even a little worse than that. It's like they planned to run out of space knowing they had to use bus bars for the triple voltage rails (5V, -5V, 12V), and then encountered dead-ends anyway. Some of the pins of the bus bars don't go anywhere because they trapped themselves in. Hence the 3 bodge wires to carry the voltages.
You might get a kick out of the excess use of inductors near the motherboard power input. Failed FCC, add inductor, fail, add another, are we good? No add another. What? We still failed, add another. What we actually passed? Ship it.
The first rev board (the silver and black unit) is a cool relic, many of those "resistors" are actually capacitors. The crinkled copper foil from wave soldering. The lack of soldermask between IC pins. 12 volts to ruin your week if your test leads slip.
I have had some boards from a german company named Hommelwerke that I took out of an Industrial machine, there was about 20 boards inside with a lot of digital and analog stuff. Two of the 20 boards have this TI CPU in the nice ceramic white case and those two boards also have bus bars, I never found out why. The rest of the boards have nothing like this on it even them with ROM, RAM and all the D/A parts.
I just check my video where I show some of those boards and it look like the bars are hooked up to the RAM. The video was not suposed to show this boards, they was to test a camera. Their are some clear shots of the bars in this unit they are made by mektron.
ruclips.net/video/jVfSl0CjI14/видео.html&ab_channel=ts.electronics
So my guess it has something to do with the RAM on those TI CPU's. Never seen them before or in anything else.
@@thorstenmaxsinger538 Nice video and excellent camera!
Bus bars were standard on ECL mainframe systems, they were actually a good idea rather than being considered a bodge
I've seen these bars before in arcade equipment. I thought the were bus bars, but the were actually some weird kind of bus film capacitor. May be with same with these.
I love how you just took a power board covered in mystery capacitors and flipped it casually onto a metal surface. Fireworks night was ages ago.
28:04 Meanwhile, I'm sitting here screaming that you have the frigging manual SITTING NEXT YOU.
Came for electronics. Stayed for Ben's movie quotes, jokes and singing:)
I got one of these for my 9th birthday. Loved playing Hunt the Wumpus and Tombstone City on it. Programming graphics with the sprite system was a lot of fun. Backing up programs to cassette tape was a pain.
Ben could you do a Hack/Mod of something retro and make it new?
Edit: Greatest American Hero, Quantum Leap and Dallas.
Those were the themes in order.
I had a TI 99 4a when I was a kid and I loved it! My parents bought it brand new and had a good amount of add ons and a lot of games. Then later I got a complete Commodore 64 system. Monitor, printer, two disk drives, and I had a stupid amount of software. Sadly like 15 years ago, my mom threw them both out thinking they weren't worth anything anymore because they were both just sitting in storage in her basement. I found out about 10 years ago and not going to lie, I cried a lot and so did she when I showed her how much they are worth now days. I want to replace them but people want an arm and a leg for them now. 😢
Mike Post wrote tons of great theme songs for shows, GAH, Quantum Leap, Magnum PI, etc
Thanks for the nostalgia Mr. Heck this was the 1st PC we had in my house growing up.
That was the first "computer" I bought, in 1985! I still have it. The "cartridges" with programs were incompatible with everything else, except Klingon technology!
I found one of these in a Montreal thrift shop, but I only ever hear of them being popular up in the Southern US or Europe.
*Side note, you can do some crazy expansion to this thing with a sidecar.
@namuzed - Was that recently? The last time I saw one--actually a whole pile of them, was the warehouse-sized Salvation Army store formerly on the corner of Norte-Dame and Guy. This was in the mid-90's and they were only $1 each, and yeah, kicking myself for not buying one! I did see one before the pandemic at the GOT-JUNK store at Ville Saint-Pierre, but it had no powersupply, untested and they wanted far more than it was worth. Still looking for one, the TI99/4a was the very first computer I used, back in the early 80's. I still have the booklet with BASIC programming I used when I was just 10 years old, from an after school thing my parents sent me to.
These computers had Plug and Play long before Microsoft even thought of Windows. The console OS only knew about what was in the console, rather than trying to include support for every possible addon and upgrade. It had a space in the memory map with "ports" where on powerup it would search for "Device Service Routine" or DSR from peripherals. The DSRs were in ROM chips in each peripheral. They were the drivers for the hardware and provided function calls to BASIC and other programming languages. Without a disk expansion, typing SAVE DSK1.FILENAME without a disk system would produce an error message because without the disk controller *there is no disk control code in the system*.
This was a supremely brilliant design feature. It has made it possible for people to create many peripherals unimaginable to the people who designed this computer. Whatever anyone wants to make to upgrade it can be made to work if they can write a DSR that essentially tells the console "Here I am! Here are the words that make me function!" and document how to access its functions and features with various programming languages, or if it's something like a printer, a new storage device etc, the total functionality may be contained within the DSR and it'll "Just Work".
Assume someone made a USB 1.1 card for the expansion box. They might give it the device name USB1 so with the card plugged in saving to USB would be as easy as SAVE USB1.FILENAME and loading it back would be OLD USB1.FILENAME Yes, OLD = LOAD. No idea why TI used OLD instead of LOAD like *all other micros*.
This sort of 'infinite extendability' should have become the way to design operating systems so that hardware would contain its own drivers in fast access storage onboard, and simply connecting new peripherals would be all that's needed to install them, and disconnecting them would make it like they were never there.
Greatest america hero... I sing that theme song at least twice a week.... Born in 73 - all the humming brings back my child hood...
When TI had their fire sale, my dad bought two of these. At one point we had a stack of five of them, and cartridges a-plenty. We even had the thing on CompuServe back in the days of 300 baud modems and CompuServe.
I owned this computer for about a year and a half. I had the speech module and a number of games on cartridge: Chess and Parsec. Sold it when saw the C64 and it was just so much faster than this, despite only being 8bit lol! Still, I enjoyed my time with it though. Thanks for the memories, Ben!
I grew up on the TI 99/4A. It's what got me into programming.
This is awesome. I had one of these growing up when I was 11 or 12 =). Had the cassette player to save programs and voice module for parsec game.
I think the video chip had 8-bit data bus, which meant that the computer had to access the video chip multiple times to get a full 16-bit word from the 16K RAM.
Also, it seems like TI BASIC was written in virtual machine language(GPL), and virtual machine itself was stored on the graphics ROM(I'm not sure if CPU was able to execute directly from the ROM, or maybe CPU had to copy to the RAM?).
No wonder why it was so slow.
Ah, the first coimputer I ever had. A friend of my dad's sold us one, with a small collection of game cartridges, including TI's version of Space Invaders, their version of Pac-Man, a chess game, and a few others. If you wanted to save programs you had written in BASIC, you had to buy a separate tape cassette recorder.
Oh boy! I miss the one I had, with the voice synthesis module and the game Alpiner. I also remember a fame called Hunt the Wumpus, but couldn't ever figure it out.
Awesome; this was my first computer, taught myself ti-basic when I was 7🤣
mine too
It had good sound. Multi channel and easy to program.
@@TheRainHarvester Sure did/was:-) I have a fond memory of my brother and I programming the Star Wars theme on it.
I still have mine, working with the expansion box, floppy drives, speech synthesizer, game cartridges, various peripherals and other paraphernalia.
Still love the old military spec chips and elsewhat used in it.
Boy, he finally went off the deep end...
Ben do you need one of us to come over an check on you and Bud? Preferably not someone from Texas...
@Ben Heck Hacks: The 9900 was a memory-to-memory single chip version of the TMS 990 minicomputer architecture.
This essentially meant that the chip itself doesn't have discrete registers, but rather uses RAM for that purpose. These are the dual 6810 SRAMs you see, and were in fact, a screwy compromise (the original machine was supposed to have a version of the 9900, the 9985, which had an 8-bit data bus, and DRAM refresh circuitry)
It needs at a minimum, 128 words of memory to handle 8 seperate workspace pages that can be swapped out with the workspace pointer register.
As it turns out, during normal operation of the computer, this RAM is almost completely used by the code running in the ROMS, which implement an interpreter called Graphics Programming Language (GPL), which was literally TI's solution to their hamstrung architecture problem, with GPL they could put all of the RAM on the video bus, and create a simpler programming language that, while it did mimic the machine code, it was very screen oriented, and was mean to get visual displays up very quickly.
The software itself ran on very oddball ROMs with incremental offset addressing called GROMs, and the video ram would essentially be called GRAM.
The BASIC itself was written in GPL, and thus, if you think about it, was double-interpreted, BASIC tokens would be turned into GPL instructions in GRAM, which would call BASIC routines in GROM. This is why the built-in BASIC is painfully slow, and only supports the built in 16K of RAM.
The majority of software development at TI was done on TI 990/10 systems running DX10, cross compiling GPL code to development systems that had GRAM boards on an umbellicus that connected to the target system. TI really didn't want third parties writing software for the system.
Over the years, loyal hackers have learned to embrace and extend the sheer weirdness of this system to do amazing things, and TI and others made excellent expansions that made the computer very useful.
Ultimately, it was a never ending string of bone-headed NIH decisions that killed this machine.
William Shatner as Meatloaf?
One of my friends got hard-sold a Ti994a when he really wanted a C64.
I am sitting here watching this, screaming “backspace is function S!”
The TI 99/4A was our family computer back in 82. I loved it, but didnt know any better. Games on carts, and tape drive for most other software, plus writing programs. "Hunt the Wumpus" was my favorite game. I remember the salesman convinced us that we only needed the cheaper monochrome monitor.... then 6 months later I bought a color monitor. I think that was the salesman plan all along. In 84, we got the C64, and never touched the TI again. It wasnt a bad computer, but TI cut too many corners. I think they were competeing with the Vic20, but it was too late for that
Texas Atheists Vegan Crossfitter definitely uses Arch Linux BTW.
Also yes, Austin would be the place to find them for sure xD
And probably Temple OS in a VM to be ironic.
I was just watching an episode of Greatest American Hero on YT the other day. Still hilarious. Also, that was the Dallas theme, so many memories!
14:00 "Ben Heck Karaoke Time!" Theme from The Greatest American Hero (Believe It or Not) sung by Joey Scarbury.
In this edition, not only does Ben pick an awesome song, he fully commits every ounce of effort in this 100% note for note cover tune! 😆👍
The best part of Ben's videos are his extemporaneous singing and monologue high jinks.
Thanks for sharing..I had a TI 99-4A back in the day, and yes it was slow compared to other computers of the area.
Ben your ability to reverse engineer these machines is god damn impressive.
Funny thing, back in the day when I was a kid, my dad bought one of these, and I think when I was 2 or 3, I looked at the keyboard, and it didn't make sense to me, so I took all the keys off and put them in the right order (alphabetical). Let's just say my parents weren't as proud of me as I thought they would be, so they told me to fix it. I took all the keys back off, went in to the text editor, pressed where each key went, and put the correct one there. I think that's what got me started in an IT career... lol I also remember having a poker game, but never understood how to play it :-)
I grew up using this and learned basic on it. Had the speech synthesizer and a ton of games for it.
I remember seeing the TI99/4A in a few shops in the UK, circa 1981. But never knew anyone who actually bought one though. Unlike Sinclair, Commodore, etc.
We need a supercut of all of ben's singing.
“No one really had one back in the day” ... Guess that makes me no one. Didn’t have any cartridges, but it taught me BASIC.
The other smaller chip with a heat sink near the crystal is a four-phase clock generator. TI engineers knew the TMS9900 was a 12 Volt dinosaur, which is why their managers had them go with GPL (much like .NET bytecode was decades later). TI's intention was to switch to a much cheaper 8 bit CPU, but those plans never materialized as it was constantly delayed (and failed). Using GPL bytecode, TI would only have to pay Microsoft once to develop the BASIC interpreter. Plus GPL also made those command modules (cartridges) cheaper because of more compact 8-bit VM instructions instead of 16-bit native assembly.
Actually, the 4A had 2 processors. The main CPU is 8-bit, the GPU is 16-bit. Which means when you write a Mandelbrot fractal demo, the GPU will process it faster than with the CPU.
The video chip from the 4A was used in MSX computers and in Coleco's ADAM / Colecovision.
I owned 3 of these things, with Advanced BASIC and speech synthesizer, something Texas Instruments really promoted. I never got the expansion unit with disk drives. Oddly enough, a local technical college had a bunch of them.
If you're not impressed with the 99/4A, look up the Dragon's Lair cartridge some guy made for it!
The amazing follow up to the chart topper "Kitten Jail"
Grew up w this computer. Learned basic programming on it.
My first computer. I did not have the tape recorder cable for storage so I spent many hours typing in BASIC game programs from Compute! Magazine only to power off and lose it all after wards. I eventually got the data transfer cable and used my good ol Realistic brand cassette tape recorder. Ahh..simpler times.
Ben....This video is a prime example of why I started watching your vids years ago. I love the tech, the wit, and the comedy! 🤣
Thanks for doing this, there are a lot of machines i did not get to see its guts. Now I have.
TI BASIC is an ANSI-compliant BASIC interpreter, based on Dartmouth BASIC, with additions for graphics, sound, and file system access. Unlike most BASICs, only one statement is allowed per source line.
From Texas, can confirm they would act just like that
CHiPS came on before Dallas, IIRC. I remember turning on the TV too late and getting the Dallas theme song...
Holy crap man, I had one of them back in 91
Picked up one of these for $5 at a yard sale a couple years ago, glad you tackled it.
My good old TI99 is still running my house lights, since the 80's, gives control of lights from multiple switches. cheers...
256 *bytes* of scratchpad as the only fast RAM connected to the 16-bit bus? What were they thinking?
Some of your best singing I've heard :) Love the song. (Greatest American Hero theme)
LMAO dude wtf, how come the Ben Heck Show was never just this? Ben rambling, singing, joking, and also more singing is entertaining af.
The angle you film at is awkward. I want to flip the image for it to make sense!
Edit: Much easier to watch if you flip the image upside down.
It's POV so you can pretend it's you taking apart old tech and singing 80s pop culture songs
Is there a way to flip the image in Android? This angle is making me nausious.
I did a video comparing the TI99/4A and the VIC-20, and one of the crazy things was how much faster the VIC-20 was with BASIC. I had both count to 10,000 and the TI was still running after I restarted the VIC-20 program like five times. The Basic is so slow without some of the enhancement cartridges. The graphics could be lovely, though.
Love your confidence, I wish I had it haha. Thanks for the smiles.
Got one of these in the late 80's but it was beige, I could code in basic but not save anything and had like 1 game.
hi, looking for one ( ti 99 4 a) i had one in 1984, how i can get one please..?
thanks so much
I owned one of these in the early 80s and had hours of fun programming in TI Basic with its cassette recorder memory, 14K of ram about the same as the Apollo computers only 10 years earlier. they invented the pocket calculator with LED display costing around $50, about a decade before. They also made most of the first susussful intergrated circuits and op amps.
Love this computer! Still works, haven't used the voice synathizer in a long time
Bill Cosby did endorse this. I have all the original material and box and everything, and there's a software catalog with Mr. Cosby posing on the front
Quantum Leap by Mike Post, Dallas Theme Song by Jerrold Immell. Took a while for this old boomer to figure that last one. Loved Quantum Leap. Mike Post is the King of TV Theme.
@15:00 Easy! Quantum Leap!!! Used to love watching that back in the day. It was on in the UK in the early 90s. Every Tuesday on BBC 2 I think.
why the artic silver thermal paste continues, when at the moment there are much higher thermal pastes artic mx4, thermal grizzly kryonaut, gc extrem ...... etc etc
After they stopped production and were selling off remaining stock, my parents bought us one of these for $49 at K-Mart, I believe. As a computer it was pretty sucky. As a game console, it was pretty great. Get some carts and a joystick for it, and you'll be in business.
I had one of these as a 7 year old once my dad upgraded to a 386 system. Learned the basics of basic and played a lot of Parsec and Hunt the Wumpus!!
Hunting the Wumpus at least once should be on everyone's bucket list.
I dont ever remember subbing to you but your attitude to everything is really refreshing. Definitely going to keep watching you in the future!
Watching you run this makes me glad I never got the one I found in the trash as a child working.
But how did they get the software to a solid state? All my software just pees my carpet after I open wierd emails....
Fctn + back didn’t work? The row that back was on seemed to be hot keyed to the gray dot which is the Fctn button
"Sorry TI, you pulled a Subway on that one". Not even close Ben.
I've got 5 or 6 of these... 3 of them in the box and two not only like new but one still has the paperwork that came in the box which includes a card with a listing of repair centers to send these to if needed. One is close to where I live so I took a trip there and alas... it's not there anymore, lol. I have a couple of the voice synthesizer modules too.
I remember my friend’s grandma pulling the later “cost reduction” beige TI99/4A down from the closet in the early 90s for us to play with, definitely a distant, distant 4th behind the Apple II, Commodore 64 & Atari 8-bit computers
I can't stop laughing at the texas atheist vegan crossfiter