Im glad your audience is supporting you with being your true self. Thank you for these amazing videos and im glad you are happy. Let the Ti adventures continue!!
The TI was my first coding computer. First CRPG (Tunnels of Doom) and some of my favorite memories. Thanks for sharing. Always love seeing you and your videos.
Hey welcome back PP, that was a long break so happy to see you back with another great TI99 video. It really is one classy little computer that truly has stood the test of time. Keep these vids coming.
I was worried that you were giving up on bringing us excellent TI 99 adventures! Glad to see you back at it my friend. Thanks for another awesome video.
I sold these machines in my younger days but almost never used one. Now I have gained interest again and found your great videos. Will look trough them and follow you in the coming years. You being yourself - of course that also works fine by me. I applaud you ❤️
I am one of those who did not know or was interested in the TI-99/4A during the eighties, and nor did I think about acquiring one when I started my collection five years ago. But I can confirm the validity of your reasons: this is one of the most fascinating, entertaining and original retrocomputing platforms that I had the pleasure of rediscovering. Thank you for your work, your videos are the best.
I discovered your channel a few weeks back and have been working my way through the content. Useful stuff! I had a TI99/4a back in the 80’s and got back into them a couple of decades ago acquiring several working units, accessories and software back when they were still pretty affordable. I am looking forward to getting caught up on your videos and all the future videos to come.
Nice. The TI-99 scene is a pretty great place to be, these days. The tools, utilities, documentation, and even new hardware, just takes things to a whole different level.
Please make more content. I love your channel. I would like to see you perusing and commenting on any TI99 catalogs or documentation. The Extended Basic guide was my jumpstart into programming.
How nice to see something new again. I find your new look somewhat surprising, but quite pleasant. The main thing is that you feel comfortable. I really appreciate your expertise on our TI-99 /4A and how you convey it in the videos. Keep up the good work!
Always love your content. Love and so happy for you! :) Look forward to more great content. I amazed at all the games I never got to play or heard of when I had my TI-99/4A back in the early 80s. The growth of the 99er community has been awesome to watch. Definitely need to get me a PEB.
I have a question for you and all the Ti-99 pros out there: why does the speech synthesizer have a little door on the front that doesn't seem to serve any purpose? Thank you! 👍
It was originally intended that "Speak-and-Spell" like vocabulary modules would be available for the unit. Some few speech synthesizers actually made it to market with a socket installed for them. Such modules were even advertised in TI's 1980 vendor price lists and promotional materials. But by mid-1980, it was clear this was made needless by two main factors. First, the unit supported streaming external speech data from the host machine anyway, so storing it in a plug-in module (instead of just as generic software data on cart/disk/cassette/whatever) was completely unnecessary. And second, because the text-to-speech routines (available on disk and via the Terminal Emulator II cart) offered a flexible solution for generating new speech samples on a software level.
In South America in the early 80s with almost no magazine and any information about the rest of the IT world many of us thought the TI 99 only had cassette I/O thus we were stuck with really basic BASIC "games" (and only with Extended BASIC cartridge which was not cheap by any means). Then around 1985 some local magazines (which in most cases copied articles and ads from US mags) popularized the whole array of games and some productivity software in cartridge format.Importing accesories and hardware from the north was expensive and only very few people had joysticks, carts or any other hardware besides the cassette cable to save and load from audio tapes with a cheap audio recorder (which was the only common format widely sold). When I saw a TI 99/4A with monitor , speech synthesis and PEB floppies in a hotel expo around 1986 that blew my mind.
Very cool to hear about the TI-99 experience in a South American context. Not something we hear about much, in the community. The Italian and German communities being the biggest contributors (also, some Nordic users) outside the Anglosphere. But cool to hear what the TI-99 looked like in South America, in its prime, as I say.
I've just acquired a TI99/4A and it's been exciting to watch a few of your videos and get familiar with it, so thanks for the great information! Also, I love your outfit and makeup!!
I must say that I am proud that you can out. I am also a trans-woman and still enjoy programming the TI to this day. By the way I am 71 years old and am working on creating a TI CNC / Laser / 3D printer platform using GCODE, which is a standard for CNC machines. Please keep up the good work. I enjoy watching your RUclips videos.
Imagine my surprise when I loaded RUclips and found a new Pixel Pedant video after such an extended absence. Great to see you again, in a manner of speaking, for the first time. Excellent content as always. You honour our passion like no one else. Don't make us wait so long moving forward.
It won't be too long a wait, I don't think. I've got a long backlog of video ideas at this point. This one really just took so long due to my getting caught in a catch-22 consisting of "I'm done dressing up as a man, ever" and "being openly trans on RUclips seems like a very bad idea". But with that bridge finally crossed, it's back at it, and time to take on all the TI-99 ideas that went on the back burner for a while there! :)
@@PixelPedant I applaud your courage on so many levels. Just happy to have you back. Introducing your true-self is just an added bonus! btw, the replacement datasette cable DID fix my cassette problems, which made Hell's Hall's (and my Moonbeam collection) playable once again. I avoided testing it for several months for fear it wouldn't work, and would add dissappointment to a hobby that rarely dissappoints. (Except for Virgin Software's RoboPods, which still refuses to load from cassette. Luckily I saved it out to disc before the problems started, so it's all good.)
@@PixelPedant I hope that the overwhelmingly positive response in your comments section helps to show that any fears or concerns you might have felt were worth overcoming.
I got my 4A for my 12th birthday in 1982 and it cost £189 in the UK. It was definitely built better than my friends machines, even the BBC Micro. One friend with a BBC Micro went through three keyboards 😅 Thank you for your continuing excellent content 👍🏻
Never heard of this channel before today, just happened to be looking up this specific TI computer. Very interesting first video for me. Definitely enjoy all the coverage of this machine that you do. Whatever other people think, just do your thing and be yourself. Glad you have this resource on this somewhat obscure machine, keep up the good work!
The TI-99/4A was my very first computer. I had gotten it after some friends had gotten the original TI-99/4 (without the "A") which had the chiclet keyboard. I got it mostly because I wanted to write scripts but was also interested in the programming aspects of it. I never got that far with that although I did eventually get ambitious enough to write a metronome program which I hoped might be useful for those playing music. It might even still exist in someone's collection. I was more interested in trying to do something productive with it while my youngest brother only cared about playing games. As far as writing scripts I'm sure you could still use it for that purpose although you'd have to come up with a way of getting your files to other computers for proper formatting. Most of the peripherals were out of reach for me although I might have finally gotten the peripheral expansion box toward the end along with the RS-232 card and disk controller. The closest to this do it yourself experience today is desktop Linux. I found this video quite enjoyable.
I have a non working TI, with a stack of old tapes my Dad and me put our BASIC programs on in the 80s. I'm dying to see what's on the tapes. I've connected a mini stereo to my old iMac via a USB to 3.5mm adapter (called iMic) and used Audacity to record the audio of one of the programs in mono. I then try and load this into the js99er emulator, where I can hear all the usual sounds, but nothing happens (this method works with loading other audio files I've downloaded from the net). I seem to remember the tape recorder we used in the 80s was a simple mono recorder with both tone and volume dials, and that the TI was really fussy that both had to be right. But I've tried all volume levels on the stereo and it doesn't have a tone control. Do you think the next step would be finding a simple 80s era tape recorder online and trying that? Or could it just be that 80s era tape has deteriorated enough that the sound recorded on it isn't right now?
It's ideal to use a TI Program Recorder if you can grab one. They generally go quite cheap. Everyone had one, so there are gobs of them still out there in working order. Next step I'd take would be to try to extract any digital audio program recording to file using CS1er (www.cs1er.com/). Classic99 also supports WAV audio input for cassette programs, so if you want to test the audio recording directly via an emulator, that is another option.
Any tape recorder with a "remote control signal" line works equally well. Back when tapes were common, a lot of decks had this capability. Basically, look for any tape deck with three 3.5mm plugs. One is for audio in, one is for audio out, and one allows the external device to start or stop (or rather, "pause," really) either recording or playback. I originally used a Radio Shack " piano keys" tape deck, and later used a pocket-sized microcassette recorder which I also used for class note taking. (I went through a lot of microcassette tapes!) Of course, by that point I also had my PEB, but for small stuff, using a tape was sometimes the easier choice... blank floppies were harder to get back then than tapes, and quite a bit pricier - important when on a self-funded college student's budget! Today, though, I no longer use any of those, though I still own them. I dubbed off the casssette tapes to my PC and used Dean Corcoran's "CS1er" to convert the audio into TIFILES format... now stored on my Tipi/32K device, and soon also on my new TipiPEB device. And no longer plan to use that tape deck approach ever again. I did the same for my old 5-1/4" floppies. I built up a rig inside on a Vantec NextStar DX enclosure, designed for SATA optical drives. I gutted the electronics, installed a "new old stock" Teac FD-55GFR floppy disk drive, a Device Side Data FC5025 floppy drive controlled board, and some customized mounting and harness components, to get a portable USB-connected 5.25" floppy drive. The software provided by Device Side Data can read pretty much every 5.25 or 3.5 floppy format. So, I've been transferring every old floppy I can find into an appropriate format... "img" for IBM PC style disks, and TIDISK (native) format for TI-99 ones. I had a minor disaster with the first pass on the floppies, as the plastic bits on the read-write head crumbled and the remaining sharp edge of the head subsequently destroyed one of my old floppies (fortunately, one that had only my own keyed-in programs from 99'er magazine and thus was easily replaced.) I obtained another disk drive and completed the transfers, but remained shocked by seeing the read/write head on that drive become a "floppy disk surface removal scraping head." So, I no longer will trust tape or floppy magnetic media storage at all. Besides the media itself being hard to come by, the drives and players are even harder to get and are becoming more and more unreliable. Computer hard disk drives can face the same ussues, so for important storage, for me, I put it all on a NAS server with a multiply-redundant RAID system, so if (or rather, "when") a drive fails, I don't lose data, and can swap in a new drive and restore everything. I've got a ton of stuff there, including a vast amount of TI-99 material... a handful of which actually came from PP himself. He has an outstanding library of user manuals, for instance. And he created a terrific "tweaked" version of TI-Trek using some neat digitized TOS actor's speech. But... as a rule... I would discourage you from trying to use either cassette tapes OR floppy disks. If you must, try using a floppy emulator, which REALLY uses solid-state SD cards.
I love your channel. The TI was the computer that taught me how to write code. I hope you keep your channel alive for a long time to come. Cheers for now.
My first PC was an IBM PCjr. Also considered a failure but really a great system i still own and use today. I knew of the TI-99 and thought the it was no good but this video completely changed my mind. Very good video!
Just found your channel. Don't worry about how people feel about the new you. The retro community is pretty awesome and accepting. :) I never had a chance to play with a ti-99 back in the day. So finding you channel has been very informative. Wow you know so much about this machine!! Looking forward to watching g and learning! God bless and thanks for the videos!! 😊
Thank you for another excellent video. I got my TI-99 back in the early 90s from a junk shop in north London for £5, only knowing it was a computer I had never seen before. Thanks to your videos I realise that it really is the little that could. Next stop, more memory and a speech synthesiser for me. Keep these excellent videos coming 👍
Yeah, the 32K is a must have, for sure. The difference between having a computer with 256 bytes of CPU RAM and having a computer with 32K+256B of CPU RAM is, needless to say, pretty significant :)
I started following you about a year or so ago. I grew up with the Apple II line but got my first TI99 about 20 years ago, and everything that I've done with it has been very enjoyable. I could have totally seeing myself getting into this platform as a kid. I always look forward to your new videos because they always give me some ideas on what to do with the machine. Keep it up and I look forward to new videos! (And good luck with the transformation! I have a few trans friends (gay myself), and I know it involves a lot. I hope it's a smooth transition to the you that you've wanted to be, probably for quite some time. :) )
Thank you for the well wishes! I identified as gay for a long time myself before coming out as trans, so I certainly see the overlap and interconnections in the communities. Drag and gay femme culture is an outlet for a lot of girls along the way, as it was for me.
I was not born until the 90s so I feel like I missed so many good early computer things like this. Well I got to grow up with windows 95 which was still a big improvement but limited in it's own ways.
It sucked when TI announced the end of the 994A. I loved it and, liked to program it even when the cassette was slow. My next computer was the Atari 800xl. It was fun, but I'll always have fun memories of my TI!
Welcome back! Would love to see a series on how TI homebrew has developed - hardware/software, etc. You hint toward some of it here, but doing a series on sometimes99er, Rasmus, etc, would be awesome!
I really enjoyed Alpiner with the optional Speech Synthesizer that produced digitized male and female voices which was extremely impressive to show off to my friends in the early 1980s.
I am a 52 year old Cornishman living in Kerry Ireland and came across your Chanel while doing retro computing / electronics nerd out shite … am currently working my way thorough your back catalogue. This one passed me by first time round … had TRS80 though …. So thank you .. and May I say …. Wasn’t sure if you were coming out or trick or treating your regulars ….! Just wanted to say thanks for the vid and you have a regular fan here in Ireland …. From our non binary Kingdom to yours ! Now …. Where can I get my hands on some of that weird computing shite !
I never programmed any BASIC on the TI-99 back in the day, so I was shocked to learn how slow it was from your channel. But since then, I've learned that ZX Spectrum BASIC was almost as slow (I had no direct familiarity with the ZX Spectrum due to living in NTSC-land).
The TS2068, which was an enhanced and incompatible ZX Spectrum for NTSC-land (but only released in the US and Canada AFAIK) had a slightly enhanced version of the ZX Spectrum's BASIC, with several extra keywords. It was almost definitely just as slow though, as I doubt any of the rest of it was changed more than necessary to make it compatible with the new firmware and hardware.
Thanks for the great overview of the TI's best bits. Good point about the ageing thing too, it's the only non-custard coloured retro machine I've got. The best looking too.
Fixing the "custard color" issue is pretty trivial... hydrogen peroxide and UV light can make all but the worst examples look like new again. I personally use a material called "Retro-Brite" which is a spray on hydrogen peroxide-filled gel... Much easier to work with than liquid hydrogen peroxide, if just slightly less effective than immersion in liquid hydrogen peroxide. I've returned many "custard colored" items to "like new" white or off-white appearance. Of course, you have to do this just with the plastic parts... No exposure to the electronics, naturally. But most electronics devices can be stripped down easily. Me, I just spray the plastic parts, put them into clear plastic bags, and leave them in the Texas sunshine for a day, flipping as necessary for full UV exposure. (The bags prevent the peroxide from just evaporating away.) And voila, no more "custard color."
I got my first TI/99a back in the early 80s when the beige model went on sale for about $50. My gramma bought them for a few of the family members and luckily that included my parents! I used to play the Star Trek simulator cartridge and the learning cartridge with the stories that you pick the different outcomes in the lunch room. Thank god for the box and clamshell storage which has kept our original TI in mint shape all these years. I just bought a copy of Tunnels of Doom in box with original Kmart sticker, manual and cassette tape in mint shape! Just need to find an affordable cassette drive so I can play it. If you have any lying around you’d part with let me know. 😅
That will be a good video when the time comes, indeed! Just a few key components need full implementation before I think a preview will make sense and give a reasonable idea of design intentions. Mainly, as it seems to me, 1) text compression/extraction, 2) menu scripting, 3) spell system events. Those are all interlinked, as spell events/outcomes (and all other non-movement player actions) are handled as menu actions, which are scripted via compressed menu strings, which contain pointers to text fragments and variable values from which displayed text is constructed. So all that kind of needs to be fully in place.
Indeed, the MSX1 is *identical* in graphics capabilities to the TI-99/4A. Both use the 9918A. So in retrospect looking at the last generation of MSX1 games at the end of the 80s is a great reference point for TI-99 folks, when looking for graphical design ideas for the chip. I literally have a directory called "MSX Bitmap Mode" which is dedicated to various MSX1 graphics (mostly 1987-1990 era) which I think use the chip's bitmap mode especially well, and so serve as great TI-99 development inspiration on the art side of things.
My first computer was a TI-99/4a and I could only afford to store my BASIC programs on a tape recorder. I was very fortunate to have been given a system with PEB recently and quickly got myself a 32K memory expansion and a disk drive. Now I want to learn Assembly language on the system. Any plans to make some Assembly Language videos for the TI? I would certainly watch those. Thanks
I second the interest in more discussion of Assembly. I used my TI throughout college, at a pretty prestigious engineering school, and did a ton of programming in E/A, though mostly as basic "mathematical problem solving" stuff. In other words, I was never designing my software to be entertaining or pretty... just efficient. I gave up on doing anything serious in BASIC pretty quickly. Writing the algorithms was trivially easy, but doing anything serious just took forever. Apart from a quick familiarization phase... Learning about the TI's registers and vectors... I was surprised at just how quickly and easily it came to me. Not much harder than writing in BASIC. But tremendously faster. Of course, in our classes at the time we were using FORTRAN77. So, I was used to writing, compiling, running, debugging... lather, rinse, repeat. The same applies to TI Assembly coding. It's not as immediate as a real-time-translated language like BASIC. I'd often write out the equations and test them in BASIC, then transcribe them (from printouts) into E/A. I went through a lot of tractor-feed paper that way, but it was worth it. So, I know assembly in the TI... but I don't know about writing user friendly, enjoyable programs in it. And I'd love to see some discussion of that topic. I'm not sure PP has that expertise, though... I've never heard him claim to, at least! The guys who DO... Ras, Tursi, etc... do have their own channels, but aren't nearly as... "user friendly"... as PP has historically been.
Is that pic of all those Atarisoft carts from your own personal collection? I've been hoping for a while you'd give us a dedicated Atarisoft overview video, a tour through all their games basically. I know that some of them were really top notch ports, while others, like Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, suffered from a bit of slowdown. And a lot of the lesser Atarisoft games don't get too much coverage on the whole. Great video, as always!
That's a fun idea for a video, actually, yeah. I don't mention the Atarisoft games quite as much as others, simply because they're perhaps the least unique to the system. But a full rundown of the Atarisoft collection could be really worthwhile. Some of them barely ever get mentioned, and deserve some discussion.
Thank you! This was the last place I still hadn't mustered the courage to do it, for a while there. But with that done, now I can get back to some retrocomputing!
@@PixelPedant i was literally jaw-on-floor surprised lol. You seem to be much more comfortable and less stiff in speaking now too. I'll always remain a staunch supporter!!
Me seeing thumbnail: His wife is cute... Me watching the vid: OH... Is there a Mr. Pedant? 😘😅 Seriously tho... Been watching because of suggested vids, but just subbed. You make quality content. 👍 I'm tempted to troll certain commentors, but don't let the bastards grind you down. Do you! 🤘
I just obtained my first TI computer ever this past weekend. It was a TI-99/4A with PEB. I ran into your channel looking for information on what I could do with it. Thanks for all of the content and welcome back! Enjoy living as your true self. You deserve it.
Great video, as always. Your earlier video on "Must have" hardware inspired me, and I'm finishing off a batch of TIPI-32Ks for the local Ti users (All three of us :-) )
I believe it was, but it was limited because things were still accessed 8 bits at a time, so it ran at effectively half speed if I'm remembering correctly.
Since the TMS9900 was commercially available before the 99/4 which used it, there were *technically* TMS9900 (and thus 16-bit) computer kits introduced (albeit very obscurely) before TI got their own TMS9900 computer out the door and onto the mainstream home market. But that's *really* splitting hairs, and basically accusing TI of beating *themselves* to market. Regardless, the TI-99/4 was unequivocally the first 16-bit mass market retail home computer.
@@PixelPedantThank you for taking the time to reply so comprehensively. As a Brit I was, like many in the early eighties, a Sinclair owner. Christmas 1981 saw me with a ZX81 and 83 with e ZX Spectrum. These machines had serious limitations but the fascination was wonderful. Good old times.
Interesting! I never heard of that happening. Where did you live? Did this happen even when the room was room temperature? Was this a 99/4 or /4A? Metal or Beige? Original or QI 2.2 motherboard? There is a heatsink on the VDP, which is the only chip that might need it, other than the clock generator on early models. Normally that is enough to keep the system cool enough. So sorry you had such a crappy experience with your first computer!
Not encountered your channel before but just wanted to say thank you for the retro-computing content (always a passion) and congrats, you’re looking fab :) …. will look forward to more vids!
CorComp and Myarc too. I had a CorComp RAMdisk in my PE-Box which I loaded all my floppies too. Had its own power brick to keep the contents alive. Was still using the system when the Geneve was coming out, but by then I got an AT&T 7300/3b1. Another strange duck of a machine. 😀
You had a 7300/3b1 at home? Wow! We had a ring of them at the computer lab at my college, but by the time I got there in 92, no one ever used them that I was aware of (and I worked in the lab as a "consultant"). What did you use yours for/what did you have for it?
Great video, as allways. To me, ti99 was my computer at school, when I learn Basic. My classroom at a point, changed all the computers to msx. I liked ti basic and logo best
Congratulations!! ❤ I had completely forgotten about Popeye until I hear that sound effect! Triggered a 40+ year old synapse I didn't even know I had edit: Hell's Halls was Kubrickian AF
Omg! Was shocked to see your transformation. Love your content, though, as always. Period. Ignore the nasty comments as they are just projecting their own insecurities.
Probably not the best move, putting personal contact info "in the clear" here. People with all variety of nefarious motives... from all sides of the sociopolitical spectrum... might make "ill use" of it. Unless that's a special account you have JUST for giving out in "high risk" situations... you might wanna edit that out of the above post! 🤯
I have always wanted an earlier 1st gen micro… I always had my eye on the TI-99/4A, but since I recently became a fan of the early Mac platform and got myself a Plus and some other systems, I kiiiinda want an Apple ][. Though, I truly only have TI money, hah. Guess that’s one thing which hasn’t changed over time?
Thank you! It's awesome to be back and creating content. And doing it as I actually am is really the only way it was ever going to happen again. So I'm delighted to see folks offering support, and inviting that.
They're ones that people had to figure out how to use well, though. When you look at the C64' s palette, for example, its desaturated "autumn" colours just suit themselves very intuitively to, say, a darkly realistic RPG (browns, greys, greens, and so on). While the TI-99's palette is a *lot* more "all over the place". Magenta, Cyan, Yellow, and so on. So using the TI-99's very vibrant palette well can be really striking. But using it badly can, conversely, have rather garish results.
@@PixelPedant Good point. Now that I think about it, I can totally envision games looking similar to what you’d expect to see on a ZX Spectrum if colors aren’t chosen wisely.
@@PixelPedant The worst computer for that was possibly the ZX Spectrum, however, there was seemingly method to Sir Clive's madness .... that palette really works well with black 'n' white TV's. I love all the greens on the TI , I can make nice forest scenery. With red tree trunks of course!
The TI-99 architecture was truly odd, with its 16 but CPU in an architecture not suited for taking advantage of it. I wonder what a truly 16 bit realization would have been like. I guess that's the Geneve 9640, but I've never seen one.
Right....Hold on a goddamn minute here, there's something very different about this video. Have you uploaded it in a different aspect ratio? Like the subtle shade of lip gloss by the way, good job on the nails too!!!!
It does require tape or disk (as well as cartridge), and TI produced both for their own adventures (which came in the package). In the end, this was a big perk, since it let people develop new Tunnels of Doom adventures into the mid to late 80s.
@@PixelPedant Wow, I did not know people could write their own adventures with it. I know the game was totally awesome playing it with my friends back in 1984!
@@johnsmith1953x John, he put out several videos discussing TOD, its editor (which came later, from a third party) and the flood of third party and home-made mods for TOD which followed on from there. Very informative, entertaining, and he provided links to download the relevant levels and tools.
Woa sis, that's a pretty outfit you wearing there, you look amazing. Apploud your bravery, and of course amazing content, I didn't know about TI-99 until now, thank you
I t wasn't a bad machine and would have been much more successful if it was a little cheaper and had a lot more software availability. In the UK this machine The Oric, & the Dragon were forced out of the market by the ZX SPECTRUM & Vic 20 & Commodore 64. who's software was also cheaper.
The TI-99 was, in the end, killed by two poor decisions. First, not providing adequate directly-adressable memory up-front. And second, trying to create a "proprietary software ecosystem." The TI's CPU was exceptionally capable for the era, so hobbling it as they did by forcing all memory to go through the video subsystem first was just... nuts. And forcing it through an 8-bit bus when the CPU could handle 16-bit memory access. Had TI implemented a direct-access 16-bit memory subsystem... which they had the hardware available for, and only needed a few more traces on the main system bus to support... there would have been nothing on the market which could have competed. The PEB concept was just a fleshing out of that main system bus concept. Following on from the earlier, less efficient daisy-chain approach. Today's we're used to PCs having a row of PCIe slots. TI really created that concept with the PEB. In retrospect, what TI ought to have done, hardware-wise, was to start off with the PEB concept, allow PEBs to be daisy-chained if necessary, with a "CPU card" in the first and, if necessary, a "client card" in subsequent boxes. The PEB backplane would be JUST the system bus(es) and power distribution. A wider bus, and thus a larger card-edge connector at each slot... but a far more efficient system, using the same basic hardware but much more effectively. The audio and video system could be a separate card, allowing upgrades over time or even a tiered set of options. With 16-bit memory addressing... already supported by the CPU... you could have up to 64K of directly addressable CPU memory (and the SAMS concept for paging that still being entirely available, but with 64K pages rather than the 32K we're limited to now.) The limit as to how many different devices ("cards") you could use would just be limited by the CRUBASE (hardware ID, essentially) availability. With the existing system design having the CRUBASE as a four-bit number, this meant only 16 unique devices could be present... But again, this is just an address-bus-width issue... add four more CRU address lines, for 8-bit CRU addresses, and the hardware could have supported up to 256 separate system devices. (Still, 16 unique devices is more than any 99'er has ever been able to use, given the existing hardware availability, I suspect!) Even with the poor memory design issues... which adding the 32K expansion partially resolves... it was TI's mismanagement of the software ecosystem that really killed off the system. They really wanted to be the sole source of all software for the system. Which was just stupid, frankly. What made the IBM PC the default standard we still use today was its wide-open software ecosystem. Anyone could write and distribute software... IBM didn't insist on "owning" every bit of published code. On the other hand, IBM was too loose regarding their hardware... which explains why IBM got driven out of the PC business. The smart move for TI would have been to go "wild west" regarding software... just charge a basic licence fee and a perform a basic "quality check" on any and all 3rd party software which would get the "certified compatible" rating. Other software might exist, but "buyer beware." On the other hard, make all system chassis, memory, and CPU hardware internally. Maybe all audio and video, too. But allow for 3rd-party add-on cards, after undergoing rigorous compatibility testing and a decent licensing fee. Had TI taken this approach... Open up hardware a little, open up software a lot, and implement a system bus architecture "wide enough" to support everything the system hardware potentially could do... ... We'd all be working, today, on a TI-based infrastructure rather than an IBM-based one.
Been following you and your channel practically since the start. Missed yout videos! Works for me! Welcome back!
Welcome back, it's great to see another wonderful 99 video from you!
It's great to be back. I've got a whole backlog of video ideas, given I've not done one since June. So hopefully I'll have another in not too long.
Im glad your audience is supporting you with being your true self. Thank you for these amazing videos and im glad you are happy. Let the Ti adventures continue!!
The TI was my first coding computer. First CRPG (Tunnels of Doom) and some of my favorite memories.
Thanks for sharing. Always love seeing you and your videos.
Hey welcome back PP, that was a long break so happy to see you back with another great TI99 video. It really is one classy little computer that truly has stood the test of time. Keep these vids coming.
I was worried that you were giving up on bringing us excellent TI 99 adventures! Glad to see you back at it my friend. Thanks for another awesome video.
I sold these machines in my younger days but almost never used one. Now I have gained interest again and found your great videos. Will look trough them and follow you in the coming years. You being yourself - of course that also works fine by me. I applaud you ❤️
I am one of those who did not know or was interested in the TI-99/4A during the eighties, and nor did I think about acquiring one when I started my collection five years ago. But I can confirm the validity of your reasons: this is one of the most fascinating, entertaining and original retrocomputing platforms that I had the pleasure of rediscovering. Thank you for your work, your videos are the best.
I discovered your channel a few weeks back and have been working my way through the content. Useful stuff! I had a TI99/4a back in the 80’s and got back into them a couple of decades ago acquiring several working units, accessories and software back when they were still pretty affordable. I am looking forward to getting caught up on your videos and all the future videos to come.
Nice. The TI-99 scene is a pretty great place to be, these days. The tools, utilities, documentation, and even new hardware, just takes things to a whole different level.
Your content has always been top notch.
Looking forward to more vids.
Nice to see you!
Always a joy to be here! Thank you and keep it coming :)
Please make more content. I love your channel. I would like to see you perusing and commenting on any TI99 catalogs or documentation. The Extended Basic guide was my jumpstart into programming.
I respect your bravery. Always enjoy your videos covering the Ti 99. Cheers!
“Bravery”
How nice to see something new again.
I find your new look somewhat surprising, but quite pleasant.
The main thing is that you feel comfortable.
I really appreciate your expertise on our TI-99 /4A and how you convey it in the videos.
Keep up the good work!
@MostafaElSakari your damn right, it's bravery. We all know the ti99 sucks and doesn't deserve to even exist
Always love your content. Love and so happy for you! :) Look forward to more great content. I amazed at all the games I never got to play or heard of when I had my TI-99/4A back in the early 80s. The growth of the 99er community has been awesome to watch. Definitely need to get me a PEB.
I have a question for you and all the Ti-99 pros out there: why does the speech synthesizer have a little door on the front that doesn't seem to serve any purpose? Thank you! 👍
It was originally intended that "Speak-and-Spell" like vocabulary modules would be available for the unit. Some few speech synthesizers actually made it to market with a socket installed for them. Such modules were even advertised in TI's 1980 vendor price lists and promotional materials. But by mid-1980, it was clear this was made needless by two main factors. First, the unit supported streaming external speech data from the host machine anyway, so storing it in a plug-in module (instead of just as generic software data on cart/disk/cassette/whatever) was completely unnecessary. And second, because the text-to-speech routines (available on disk and via the Terminal Emulator II cart) offered a flexible solution for generating new speech samples on a software level.
Awesome. Thank you.
I'm here for the content, thank you.
Great! I started my computing life with TI 99 4A in 1983
In South America in the early 80s with almost no magazine and any information about the rest of the IT world many of us thought the TI 99 only had cassette I/O thus we were stuck with really basic BASIC "games" (and only with Extended BASIC cartridge which was not cheap by any means).
Then around 1985 some local magazines (which in most cases copied articles and ads from US mags) popularized the whole array of games and some productivity software in cartridge format.Importing accesories and hardware from the north was expensive and only very few people had joysticks, carts or any other hardware besides the cassette cable to save and load from audio tapes with a cheap audio recorder (which was the only common format widely sold).
When I saw a TI 99/4A with monitor , speech synthesis and PEB floppies in a hotel expo around 1986 that blew my mind.
Very cool to hear about the TI-99 experience in a South American context. Not something we hear about much, in the community. The Italian and German communities being the biggest contributors (also, some Nordic users) outside the Anglosphere. But cool to hear what the TI-99 looked like in South America, in its prime, as I say.
I've just acquired a TI99/4A and it's been exciting to watch a few of your videos and get familiar with it, so thanks for the great information! Also, I love your outfit and makeup!!
Great video. As always. Looking forward to many many more
Well, I wasn't expecting that. But you're the best TI channel there is. It's all good. Thanks for another great video!
Glad you comb through the hardware and history of that brand
I'm glad you're back. Always something fun on the TI.
I must say that I am proud that you can out. I am also a trans-woman and still enjoy programming the TI to this day. By the way I am 71 years old and am working on creating a TI CNC / Laser / 3D printer platform using GCODE, which is a standard for CNC machines. Please keep up the good work. I enjoy watching your RUclips videos.
Imagine my surprise when I loaded RUclips and found a new Pixel Pedant video after such an extended absence.
Great to see you again, in a manner of speaking, for the first time.
Excellent content as always. You honour our passion like no one else. Don't make us wait so long moving forward.
It won't be too long a wait, I don't think. I've got a long backlog of video ideas at this point. This one really just took so long due to my getting caught in a catch-22 consisting of "I'm done dressing up as a man, ever" and "being openly trans on RUclips seems like a very bad idea". But with that bridge finally crossed, it's back at it, and time to take on all the TI-99 ideas that went on the back burner for a while there! :)
@@PixelPedant I applaud your courage on so many levels. Just happy to have you back. Introducing your true-self is just an added bonus!
btw, the replacement datasette cable DID fix my cassette problems, which made Hell's Hall's (and my Moonbeam collection) playable once again. I avoided testing it for several months for fear it wouldn't work, and would add dissappointment to a hobby that rarely dissappoints. (Except for Virgin Software's RoboPods, which still refuses to load from cassette. Luckily I saved it out to disc before the problems started, so it's all good.)
@@PixelPedant I hope that the overwhelmingly positive response in your comments section helps to show that any fears or concerns you might have felt were worth overcoming.
Another great video. Thanks for all the work to make these!
Great video. Same great content! It's just about time to dig out my TI-99/4a out of storage.
Amazing content as usual! Thanks so much for giving us this amazing nostalgia fix 😸
I got my 4A for my 12th birthday in 1982 and it cost £189 in the UK.
It was definitely built better than my friends machines, even the BBC Micro. One friend with a BBC Micro went through three keyboards 😅
Thank you for your continuing excellent content 👍🏻
Great video, I loved TI Forth running from the PEB, it make me feel like a real programmer.
Never heard of this channel before today, just happened to be looking up this specific TI computer. Very interesting first video for me. Definitely enjoy all the coverage of this machine that you do. Whatever other people think, just do your thing and be yourself. Glad you have this resource on this somewhat obscure machine, keep up the good work!
The TI-99/4A was my very first computer. I had gotten it after some friends had gotten the original TI-99/4 (without the "A") which had the chiclet keyboard. I got it mostly because I wanted to write scripts but was also interested in the programming aspects of it. I never got that far with that although I did eventually get ambitious enough to write a metronome program which I hoped might be useful for those playing music. It might even still exist in someone's collection. I was more interested in trying to do something productive with it while my youngest brother only cared about playing games. As far as writing scripts I'm sure you could still use it for that purpose although you'd have to come up with a way of getting your files to other computers for proper formatting. Most of the peripherals were out of reach for me although I might have finally gotten the peripheral expansion box toward the end along with the RS-232 card and disk controller. The closest to this do it yourself experience today is desktop Linux. I found this video quite enjoyable.
I have a non working TI, with a stack of old tapes my Dad and me put our BASIC programs on in the 80s. I'm dying to see what's on the tapes. I've connected a mini stereo to my old iMac via a USB to 3.5mm adapter (called iMic) and used Audacity to record the audio of one of the programs in mono. I then try and load this into the js99er emulator, where I can hear all the usual sounds, but nothing happens (this method works with loading other audio files I've downloaded from the net). I seem to remember the tape recorder we used in the 80s was a simple mono recorder with both tone and volume dials, and that the TI was really fussy that both had to be right. But I've tried all volume levels on the stereo and it doesn't have a tone control. Do you think the next step would be finding a simple 80s era tape recorder online and trying that? Or could it just be that 80s era tape has deteriorated enough that the sound recorded on it isn't right now?
It's ideal to use a TI Program Recorder if you can grab one. They generally go quite cheap. Everyone had one, so there are gobs of them still out there in working order. Next step I'd take would be to try to extract any digital audio program recording to file using CS1er (www.cs1er.com/). Classic99 also supports WAV audio input for cassette programs, so if you want to test the audio recording directly via an emulator, that is another option.
Noel's Retro Lab recently did an excellent video on this very subject: ruclips.net/video/t1nQ_1x7tjw/видео.html
@@philstevenson1741 Oh wow - Nice find!
Any tape recorder with a "remote control signal" line works equally well. Back when tapes were common, a lot of decks had this capability.
Basically, look for any tape deck with three 3.5mm plugs. One is for audio in, one is for audio out, and one allows the external device to start or stop (or rather, "pause," really) either recording or playback.
I originally used a Radio Shack " piano keys" tape deck, and later used a pocket-sized microcassette recorder which I also used for class note taking. (I went through a lot of microcassette tapes!) Of course, by that point I also had my PEB, but for small stuff, using a tape was sometimes the easier choice... blank floppies were harder to get back then than tapes, and quite a bit pricier - important when on a self-funded college student's budget!
Today, though, I no longer use any of those, though I still own them. I dubbed off the casssette tapes to my PC and used Dean Corcoran's "CS1er" to convert the audio into TIFILES format... now stored on my Tipi/32K device, and soon also on my new TipiPEB device. And no longer plan to use that tape deck approach ever again.
I did the same for my old 5-1/4" floppies. I built up a rig inside on a Vantec NextStar DX enclosure, designed for SATA optical drives. I gutted the electronics, installed a "new old stock" Teac FD-55GFR floppy disk drive, a Device Side Data FC5025 floppy drive controlled board, and some customized mounting and harness components, to get a portable USB-connected 5.25" floppy drive. The software provided by Device Side Data can read pretty much every 5.25 or 3.5 floppy format. So, I've been transferring every old floppy I can find into an appropriate format... "img" for IBM PC style disks, and TIDISK (native) format for TI-99 ones.
I had a minor disaster with the first pass on the floppies, as the plastic bits on the read-write head crumbled and the remaining sharp edge of the head subsequently destroyed one of my old floppies (fortunately, one that had only my own keyed-in programs from 99'er magazine and thus was easily replaced.) I obtained another disk drive and completed the transfers, but remained shocked by seeing the read/write head on that drive become a "floppy disk surface removal scraping head."
So, I no longer will trust tape or floppy magnetic media storage at all. Besides the media itself being hard to come by, the drives and players are even harder to get and are becoming more and more unreliable.
Computer hard disk drives can face the same ussues, so for important storage, for me, I put it all on a NAS server with a multiply-redundant RAID system, so if (or rather, "when") a drive fails, I don't lose data, and can swap in a new drive and restore everything.
I've got a ton of stuff there, including a vast amount of TI-99 material... a handful of which actually came from PP himself. He has an outstanding library of user manuals, for instance. And he created a terrific "tweaked" version of TI-Trek using some neat digitized TOS actor's speech.
But... as a rule... I would discourage you from trying to use either cassette tapes OR floppy disks. If you must, try using a floppy emulator, which REALLY uses solid-state SD cards.
I've always been a "Content of character" type of person and your content has always been top shelf (IMHO). Looking forward to more.
❤
And I still have my TI-99/4a from when I got it in 1985.
I love your channel. The TI was the computer that taught me how to write code. I hope you keep your channel alive for a long time to come. Cheers for now.
My first PC was an IBM PCjr. Also considered a failure but really a great system i still own and use today. I knew of the TI-99 and thought the it was no good but this video completely changed my mind. Very good video!
I loved the PCjr. It introduced me to King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry.
Just found your channel. Don't worry about how people feel about the new you. The retro community is pretty awesome and accepting. :) I never had a chance to play with a ti-99 back in the day. So finding you channel has been very informative. Wow you know so much about this machine!! Looking forward to watching g and learning! God bless and thanks for the videos!! 😊
Thank you for another excellent video. I got my TI-99 back in the early 90s from a junk shop in north London for £5, only knowing it was a computer I had never seen before. Thanks to your videos I realise that it really is the little that could. Next stop, more memory and a speech synthesiser for me. Keep these excellent videos coming 👍
Yeah, the 32K is a must have, for sure. The difference between having a computer with 256 bytes of CPU RAM and having a computer with 32K+256B of CPU RAM is, needless to say, pretty significant :)
I started following you about a year or so ago. I grew up with the Apple II line but got my first TI99 about 20 years ago, and everything that I've done with it has been very enjoyable. I could have totally seeing myself getting into this platform as a kid. I always look forward to your new videos because they always give me some ideas on what to do with the machine. Keep it up and I look forward to new videos! (And good luck with the transformation! I have a few trans friends (gay myself), and I know it involves a lot. I hope it's a smooth transition to the you that you've wanted to be, probably for quite some time. :) )
Thank you for the well wishes! I identified as gay for a long time myself before coming out as trans, so I certainly see the overlap and interconnections in the communities. Drag and gay femme culture is an outlet for a lot of girls along the way, as it was for me.
I was not born until the 90s so I feel like I missed so many good early computer things like this. Well I got to grow up with windows 95 which was still a big improvement but limited in it's own ways.
It sucked when TI announced the end of the 994A. I loved it and, liked to program it even when the cassette was slow. My next computer was the Atari 800xl. It was fun, but I'll always have fun memories of my TI!
Welcome back! Would love to see a series on how TI homebrew has developed - hardware/software, etc. You hint toward some of it here, but doing a series on sometimes99er, Rasmus, etc, would be awesome!
Just discovered this channel. Excellent content covering my favorite era of PC hardware. Thanks for this outstanding effort.
Very fun video. Thx. I subbed.
Good to have you back!
I really enjoyed Alpiner with the optional Speech Synthesizer that produced digitized male and female voices which was extremely impressive to show off to my friends in the early 1980s.
I'm more a Commodore fan, but your channel makes Texas Instruments really interesting! Also, I'm proud of you, and I love your nails!
I like the TI because it hasn't become ridiculously expensive like most micros.
I am a 52 year old Cornishman living in Kerry Ireland and came across your Chanel while doing retro computing / electronics nerd out shite … am currently working my way thorough your back catalogue. This one passed me by first time round … had TRS80 though …. So thank you .. and May I say …. Wasn’t sure if you were coming out or trick or treating your regulars ….! Just wanted to say thanks for the vid and you have a regular fan here in Ireland …. From our non binary Kingdom to yours ! Now …. Where can I get my hands on some of that weird computing shite !
I never programmed any BASIC on the TI-99 back in the day, so I was shocked to learn how slow it was from your channel. But since then, I've learned that ZX Spectrum BASIC was almost as slow (I had no direct familiarity with the ZX Spectrum due to living in NTSC-land).
The TS2068, which was an enhanced and incompatible ZX Spectrum for NTSC-land (but only released in the US and Canada AFAIK) had a slightly enhanced version of the ZX Spectrum's BASIC, with several extra keywords. It was almost definitely just as slow though, as I doubt any of the rest of it was changed more than necessary to make it compatible with the new firmware and hardware.
Thanks for the great overview of the TI's best bits. Good point about the ageing thing too, it's the only non-custard coloured retro machine I've got. The best looking too.
Fixing the "custard color" issue is pretty trivial... hydrogen peroxide and UV light can make all but the worst examples look like new again.
I personally use a material called "Retro-Brite" which is a spray on hydrogen peroxide-filled gel... Much easier to work with than liquid hydrogen peroxide, if just slightly less effective than immersion in liquid hydrogen peroxide.
I've returned many "custard colored" items to "like new" white or off-white appearance.
Of course, you have to do this just with the plastic parts... No exposure to the electronics, naturally. But most electronics devices can be stripped down easily.
Me, I just spray the plastic parts, put them into clear plastic bags, and leave them in the Texas sunshine for a day, flipping as necessary for full UV exposure. (The bags prevent the peroxide from just evaporating away.)
And voila, no more "custard color."
I got my first TI/99a back in the early 80s when the beige model went on sale for about $50. My gramma bought them for a few of the family members and luckily that included my parents! I used to play the Star Trek simulator cartridge and the learning cartridge with the stories that you pick the different outcomes in the lunch room. Thank god for the box and clamshell storage which has kept our original TI in mint shape all these years. I just bought a copy of Tunnels of Doom in box with original Kmart sticker, manual and cassette tape in mint shape! Just need to find an affordable cassette drive so I can play it. If you have any lying around you’d part with let me know. 😅
Wow, I spent ages playing Championship Baseball
Glad to see you posting videos again! When you have time, please let us see any progress on Hell's Heart ;-)
That will be a good video when the time comes, indeed! Just a few key components need full implementation before I think a preview will make sense and give a reasonable idea of design intentions. Mainly, as it seems to me, 1) text compression/extraction, 2) menu scripting, 3) spell system events. Those are all interlinked, as spell events/outcomes (and all other non-movement player actions) are handled as menu actions, which are scripted via compressed menu strings, which contain pointers to text fragments and variable values from which displayed text is constructed. So all that kind of needs to be fully in place.
So brave and looking fantastic! Great video to return with too. Thank you.
God bless orphaned hardware! Nothing builds enthusiasm like it in a retro-community...
I never owned a TI-99 but I am fascinated by these. I had a MSX though which seems similar in graphics capabilities...
Indeed, the MSX1 is *identical* in graphics capabilities to the TI-99/4A. Both use the 9918A. So in retrospect looking at the last generation of MSX1 games at the end of the 80s is a great reference point for TI-99 folks, when looking for graphical design ideas for the chip. I literally have a directory called "MSX Bitmap Mode" which is dedicated to various MSX1 graphics (mostly 1987-1990 era) which I think use the chip's bitmap mode especially well, and so serve as great TI-99 development inspiration on the art side of things.
My first computer was a TI-99/4a and I could only afford to store my BASIC programs on a tape recorder. I was very fortunate to have been given a system with PEB recently and quickly got myself a 32K memory expansion and a disk drive. Now I want to learn Assembly language on the system. Any plans to make some Assembly Language videos for the TI? I would certainly watch those. Thanks
I second the interest in more discussion of Assembly. I used my TI throughout college, at a pretty prestigious engineering school, and did a ton of programming in E/A, though mostly as basic "mathematical problem solving" stuff. In other words, I was never designing my software to be entertaining or pretty... just efficient.
I gave up on doing anything serious in BASIC pretty quickly. Writing the algorithms was trivially easy, but doing anything serious just took forever.
Apart from a quick familiarization phase... Learning about the TI's registers and vectors... I was surprised at just how quickly and easily it came to me. Not much harder than writing in BASIC. But tremendously faster.
Of course, in our classes at the time we were using FORTRAN77. So, I was used to writing, compiling, running, debugging... lather, rinse, repeat. The same applies to TI Assembly coding. It's not as immediate as a real-time-translated language like BASIC.
I'd often write out the equations and test them in BASIC, then transcribe them (from printouts) into E/A. I went through a lot of tractor-feed paper that way, but it was worth it.
So, I know assembly in the TI... but I don't know about writing user friendly, enjoyable programs in it. And I'd love to see some discussion of that topic. I'm not sure PP has that expertise, though... I've never heard him claim to, at least! The guys who DO... Ras, Tursi, etc... do have their own channels, but aren't nearly as... "user friendly"... as PP has historically been.
This is a must subscribe channel!!! Thanks for your effort creating and publishing these videos.
Congrats! I’ve made the same journey and I’m really happy for you!
Is that pic of all those Atarisoft carts from your own personal collection? I've been hoping for a while you'd give us a dedicated Atarisoft overview video, a tour through all their games basically. I know that some of them were really top notch ports, while others, like Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, suffered from a bit of slowdown. And a lot of the lesser Atarisoft games don't get too much coverage on the whole. Great video, as always!
That's a fun idea for a video, actually, yeah. I don't mention the Atarisoft games quite as much as others, simply because they're perhaps the least unique to the system. But a full rundown of the Atarisoft collection could be really worthwhile. Some of them barely ever get mentioned, and deserve some discussion.
My grandparents had one of the ti-99, but didn't have many cartridges and didn't have the tape drive. Neat machine
Thing I found most unbelievable? SNK arcade ports that aren’t fighting games or Metal Slug. Different era indeed.
Looking forward to more TI-99 magic.
You look amazing, congratulations on coming out!
Thank you! This was the last place I still hadn't mustered the courage to do it, for a while there. But with that done, now I can get back to some retrocomputing!
@@PixelPedant i was literally jaw-on-floor surprised lol. You seem to be much more comfortable and less stiff in speaking now too. I'll always remain a staunch supporter!!
There is something different. You changed your hair! :) Love it.
Love your content and channel. Still do!
Great video! Thanks 🙏
You are inspiring. Thank you for being you & taking time to share it with us. And long live the eldertech!!! ❤
Me seeing thumbnail: His wife is cute...
Me watching the vid: OH... Is there a Mr. Pedant? 😘😅
Seriously tho... Been watching because of suggested vids, but just subbed. You make quality content. 👍
I'm tempted to troll certain commentors, but don't let the bastards grind you down. Do you! 🤘
Same. I think she deleted some of the ones I was going to reply to. There is no better TI99 creator and that hasnt changrd
@@kneel1 He. It's a he. No matter how much makeup or body mutilation happens, it's STILL a dude. You can't change that.
I just obtained my first TI computer ever this past weekend. It was a TI-99/4A with PEB.
I ran into your channel looking for information on what I could do with it.
Thanks for all of the content and welcome back!
Enjoy living as your true self. You deserve it.
Thank you! I shall. And enjoy the TI-99. All the better that you got it with a PEB, for the full experience!
FYI, I actually have a TI-990 mini computer. :-) It has a 200+ lbs hard drive as well. Maybe one day, I will get around to fixing it.
Awesome, you should fix it up, and get that monster hdd spinning again
Great video, as always. Your earlier video on "Must have" hardware inspired me, and I'm finishing off a batch of TIPI-32Ks for the local Ti users (All three of us :-) )
I envy your SMD soldering skills
@@Scyllinice I got the PCB Fab house to populate the SMD :-D. THT only on this project.
Fifty YEARS! Blimey I feel old. Was the TI one of the first, if not the first, 16 bit home computers?
I believe it was, but it was limited because things were still accessed 8 bits at a time, so it ran at effectively half speed if I'm remembering correctly.
Since the TMS9900 was commercially available before the 99/4 which used it, there were *technically* TMS9900 (and thus 16-bit) computer kits introduced (albeit very obscurely) before TI got their own TMS9900 computer out the door and onto the mainstream home market. But that's *really* splitting hairs, and basically accusing TI of beating *themselves* to market. Regardless, the TI-99/4 was unequivocally the first 16-bit mass market retail home computer.
@@PixelPedantThank you for taking the time to reply so comprehensively. As a Brit I was, like many in the early eighties, a Sinclair owner. Christmas 1981 saw me with a ZX81 and 83 with e ZX Spectrum. These machines had serious limitations but the fascination was wonderful. Good old times.
I did ALL the research, finally deciding on a TI (I was about 12). I liked it, but it overheated so often I gave up on it.
Interesting! I never heard of that happening. Where did you live? Did this happen even when the room was room temperature? Was this a 99/4 or /4A? Metal or Beige? Original or QI 2.2 motherboard? There is a heatsink on the VDP, which is the only chip that might need it, other than the clock generator on early models. Normally that is enough to keep the system cool enough. So sorry you had such a crappy experience with your first computer!
Good video and good for you being you. I look forward to more videos.
Not encountered your channel before but just wanted to say thank you for the retro-computing content (always a passion) and congrats, you’re looking fab :) …. will look forward to more vids!
CorComp and Myarc too. I had a CorComp RAMdisk in my PE-Box which I loaded all my floppies too. Had its own power brick to keep the contents alive. Was still using the system when the Geneve was coming out, but by then I got an AT&T 7300/3b1. Another strange duck of a machine. 😀
You had a 7300/3b1 at home? Wow! We had a ring of them at the computer lab at my college, but by the time I got there in 92, no one ever used them that I was aware of (and I worked in the lab as a "consultant"). What did you use yours for/what did you have for it?
Nice to see you again. You look great (nice manicure!)
Great video, as allways. To me, ti99 was my computer at school, when I learn Basic. My classroom at a point, changed all the computers to msx. I liked ti basic and logo best
Interesting. What country did you grow up in?
Congratulations!! ❤
I had completely forgotten about Popeye until I hear that sound effect! Triggered a 40+ year old synapse I didn't even know I had
edit: Hell's Halls was Kubrickian AF
Omg! Was shocked to see your transformation. Love your content, though, as always. Period. Ignore the nasty comments as they are just projecting their own insecurities.
If someone wanted to chat with you about TI history for research purposes, how would they get in touch with you?
pixelpedant@gmail.com will work. I'm not really the social media sort, so email makes sense.
Probably not the best move, putting personal contact info "in the clear" here. People with all variety of nefarious motives... from all sides of the sociopolitical spectrum... might make "ill use" of it.
Unless that's a special account you have JUST for giving out in "high risk" situations... you might wanna edit that out of the above post! 🤯
@@carybrown851 I'm sure she's well aware. That doesn't have her name in it, so not likely her main email address.
Long live the Ti-99
Radio Shack had a lot of great products, but they sure made some weird business choices. Thats for sure.
I have always wanted an earlier 1st gen micro… I always had my eye on the TI-99/4A, but since I recently became a fan of the early Mac platform and got myself a Plus and some other systems, I kiiiinda want an Apple ][. Though, I truly only have TI money, hah. Guess that’s one thing which hasn’t changed over time?
It's good to see you again, and it's fantastic to see you presenting your authentic self! ❤
Thank you! It's awesome to be back and creating content. And doing it as I actually am is really the only way it was ever going to happen again. So I'm delighted to see folks offering support, and inviting that.
The colors are amazing for a computer made in 1979
They're ones that people had to figure out how to use well, though. When you look at the C64' s palette, for example, its desaturated "autumn" colours just suit themselves very intuitively to, say, a darkly realistic RPG (browns, greys, greens, and so on). While the TI-99's palette is a *lot* more "all over the place". Magenta, Cyan, Yellow, and so on. So using the TI-99's very vibrant palette well can be really striking. But using it badly can, conversely, have rather garish results.
@@PixelPedant Good point. Now that I think about it, I can totally envision games looking similar to what you’d expect to see on a ZX Spectrum if colors aren’t chosen wisely.
@@PixelPedant The worst computer for that was possibly the ZX Spectrum, however, there was seemingly method to Sir Clive's madness .... that palette really works well with black 'n' white TV's. I love all the greens on the TI , I can make nice forest scenery. With red tree trunks of course!
The TI-99 architecture was truly odd, with its 16 but CPU in an architecture not suited for taking advantage of it. I wonder what a truly 16 bit realization would have been like. I guess that's the Geneve 9640, but I've never seen one.
Right....Hold on a goddamn minute here, there's something very different about this video. Have you uploaded it in a different aspect ratio? Like the subtle shade of lip gloss by the way, good job on the nails too!!!!
Dragon's Lair was impressive
*I thought Tunnels and Doom required a tape cassette with a cartidge?*
It does require tape or disk (as well as cartridge), and TI produced both for their own adventures (which came in the package). In the end, this was a big perk, since it let people develop new Tunnels of Doom adventures into the mid to late 80s.
@@PixelPedant Wow, I did not know people could write their own adventures with it. I know the game was totally awesome playing it with my friends back in 1984!
@@johnsmith1953x
John, he put out several videos discussing TOD, its editor (which came later, from a third party) and the flood of third party and home-made mods for TOD which followed on from there. Very informative, entertaining, and he provided links to download the relevant levels and tools.
T-I-Hey!
Woa sis, that's a pretty outfit you wearing there, you look amazing. Apploud your bravery, and of course amazing content, I didn't know about TI-99 until now, thank you
It's a guy. Not a woman.
I do like your cadence in speaking.
it is shocking at first..because you had the deep voice and
facial hair.....what a change!! but if your happy thats great....
You look classy as heck, sis! ❤ thanks for the video about the TI99, I hadn't heard of it before!
I t wasn't a bad machine and would have been much more successful if it was a little cheaper and had a lot more software availability.
In the UK this machine The Oric, & the Dragon were forced out of the market by the ZX SPECTRUM & Vic 20 & Commodore 64. who's software was also cheaper.
The TI-99 was, in the end, killed by two poor decisions.
First, not providing adequate directly-adressable memory up-front. And second, trying to create a "proprietary software ecosystem."
The TI's CPU was exceptionally capable for the era, so hobbling it as they did by forcing all memory to go through the video subsystem first was just... nuts. And forcing it through an 8-bit bus when the CPU could handle 16-bit memory access.
Had TI implemented a direct-access 16-bit memory subsystem... which they had the hardware available for, and only needed a few more traces on the main system bus to support... there would have been nothing on the market which could have competed.
The PEB concept was just a fleshing out of that main system bus concept. Following on from the earlier, less efficient daisy-chain approach.
Today's we're used to PCs having a row of PCIe slots. TI really created that concept with the PEB.
In retrospect, what TI ought to have done, hardware-wise, was to start off with the PEB concept, allow PEBs to be daisy-chained if necessary, with a "CPU card" in the first and, if necessary, a "client card" in subsequent boxes. The PEB backplane would be JUST the system bus(es) and power distribution. A wider bus, and thus a larger card-edge connector at each slot... but a far more efficient system, using the same basic hardware but much more effectively.
The audio and video system could be a separate card, allowing upgrades over time or even a tiered set of options. With 16-bit memory addressing... already supported by the CPU... you could have up to 64K of directly addressable CPU memory (and the SAMS concept for paging that still being entirely available, but with 64K pages rather than the 32K we're limited to now.)
The limit as to how many different devices ("cards") you could use would just be limited by the CRUBASE (hardware ID, essentially) availability. With the existing system design having the CRUBASE as a four-bit number, this meant only 16 unique devices could be present... But again, this is just an address-bus-width issue... add four more CRU address lines, for 8-bit CRU addresses, and the hardware could have supported up to 256 separate system devices. (Still, 16 unique devices is more than any 99'er has ever been able to use, given the existing hardware availability, I suspect!)
Even with the poor memory design issues... which adding the 32K expansion partially resolves... it was TI's mismanagement of the software ecosystem that really killed off the system.
They really wanted to be the sole source of all software for the system. Which was just stupid, frankly. What made the IBM PC the default standard we still use today was its wide-open software ecosystem. Anyone could write and distribute software... IBM didn't insist on "owning" every bit of published code.
On the other hand, IBM was too loose regarding their hardware... which explains why IBM got driven out of the PC business.
The smart move for TI would have been to go "wild west" regarding software... just charge a basic licence fee and a perform a basic "quality check" on any and all 3rd party software which would get the "certified compatible" rating. Other software might exist, but "buyer beware."
On the other hard, make all system chassis, memory, and CPU hardware internally. Maybe all audio and video, too. But allow for 3rd-party add-on cards, after undergoing rigorous compatibility testing and a decent licensing fee.
Had TI taken this approach... Open up hardware a little, open up software a lot, and implement a system bus architecture "wide enough" to support everything the system hardware potentially could do...
... We'd all be working, today, on a TI-based infrastructure rather than an IBM-based one.