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Don't Mess with Texas – TI-99/4A Megademo [video]
- cptskippy 10y agoThe TI-99 is a desktop computer, at first I thought it was a calculator like the TI-98.
- happy-go-lucky 10y agoTI-99/4A was an enhanced version of TI-99/4. http://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html http://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html
- nsxwolf 10y agoI have a TI-99/4. The keyboard is so terrible the computer is nearly unusable. It's much worse than the keyboards that usually make the "bad keyboards" list - I'd happily spend all day typing on an Atari 400 or an IBM PCjr. It makes the Timex Sinclair feel like some expensive Cherry MX board.
- dTal 10y agoTI-98? No such thing as far as I know. The TI-89, now. That is a calculator. Also a significantly more capable machine in virtually every respect.
- cptskippy 10y agoYou're right, I was thinking of the TI-92.
- HerrMonnezza 10y agoDoes the demo run at this speed on a real TI-99/4A? The notes say the video has been recorded on a MAME emulator...
- happy-go-lucky 10y agoYou may want to check this out: http://hackaday.com/2017/01/30/dont-mess-with-texas-the-ti-994a-megademo/ http://hackaday.com/2017/01/30/dont-mess-with-texas-the-ti-9...
- jcl 10y agoLovely summary, thanks! I kind of wish the video description linked either to that page or directly to the creator's linked Pouet comment, as they do a pretty good job explaining why the demo is significant. http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=68783#c782205 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=68783#c782205
- diydsp 10y agoYes, I happened to watch its release at Synchrony 2017 Saturday night in Montreal.
- Olivier26 10y agoThis is an Amiga demo, the TI-99/4A wasn't so fast.
- joakleaf 10y agoWhy do you think it is an Amiga demo?
- Olivier26 10y agoThe boucing ball, and Wolf3D/Doom wasn't yet a big thing in the 1981-1984 years... And the quality of graphics and sounds, the number of colors, the speech synthesis: the TI99 was more shhhh shhhh... The real 99/4A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UxJM7AhZvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UxJM7AhZvw Not the same world!
- joakleaf 10y agoThe demo was credited as 2017, so I don't think you can really use the bouncing ball or Wolf3D as reasons. You could actually buy a speech synthesizer for the TI. Yes, the demo is impressive compared to what else was available on the machine, but it actually had a (underutilized) 3 Mhz CPU and pretty advanced graphics system. The TIs biggest problem was that it came with very little RAM, so you generally had to store application data in video memory or expansion cards, which made the machine incredibly slow. More info about the demo here: http://hackaday.com/2017/01/30/dont-mess-with-texas-the-ti-994a-megademo/ http://hackaday.com/2017/01/30/dont-mess-with-texas-the-ti-9...
- Olivier26 10y agoOK for the 2017 demo, but the TMS9900 was slower than the Z80/6502 of the same time, because it was a 16-bit microprocessor with a 8-bit bus, and registers were mapped to the RAM. This demo required power, and is very far from all other TI99/4A games, and most of them were written in assembly (the basic was too slow). So I still think it's a fake, or it is running on a deeply modified emulator, or with hardware extensions listed in the wikipedia page * ) but it's not a "vanilla" TI/994A. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
- joakleaf 10y agoI grew up and learned basic on a TI-99/4a. It was a wonderful and simple time... but TI Basic was so incredibly slow. At least Extended Basic allowed you to use sprites and overall felt a bit faster. In TI Basic, you accessed the more interesting parts of the machine "Call" functions (e.g. "Call Color", "Call Char", "Call hchar", etc.), and I always found Commodores peek/poke mess very primitive and a bit more inaccessible in comparison. On the other hand the TIs basic and extended basic didn't allow you to access the full capabilities of the machine. Possibly because they wanted you to buy their expansion cards, which I always thought was a dumb mistake from TIs side. That, and that super slow Basic. Especially, considering that the TI has decent capabilities on paper. I was only about 7 years when I started programming on the TI, and I always wanted to try to write assembler on it, but (happily) moved on to more powerful computers before I got around to it a few years later. I believe it required an extra expansion card to unlock assembler -- but I really wanted to see what the machine was capable of unconstrained by the Basic Interpreter. Thanks to the guys who made this demo. It is fun to finally get to see what could have been, and super impressive for someone who grew up programming the machine. This demo is definitely not representative of the applications and games available on the machine at the time. Well done!
- pm215 10y agoThe slow BASIC was due to the completely insane doubly-interpreted implementation. The BASIC interpreter was written in GPL (Graphics Programming Language; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A#VDP_RAM_and_GPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A#VDP...), which was itself interpreted at runtime.
- boomlinde 10y agoIf I understand that correctly, the BASIC programs were stored in VDP RAM. If that's anything like the MSX (most of which also used this video chip), that means that BASIC tokens are read from a slow 8-bit bus by writing addresses byte by byte to a port and reading the content from another. There's functionality to automatically increment the VDP address, but any non-contiguous read will have to write the VDP address to the port. I really like this layered design despite its performance impact. It meant that they could fully utilize the VDP RAM where the CPU local RAM was lacking.
- eternalban 10y agoI still have mine but don't have the setup to hook it up to a monitor. Extended Basic was sweet; wrote lots of little games with it. This machine doesn't get the love it deserves.
- mimo777 10y agoBrings back good memories. When my power pack went, I was devastated.
- arundelo 10y ago(Not relevant to this demo in particular, just a piece of trivia I only learned in the past few years:) It makes sense to think of the TI-99 as part of the 8-bit microcomputer boom of the 1980s (Commodore 64, Apple II, TRS-80), but it actually had a 16-bit processor! (Which communicated with most of the rest of the computer through an 8-bit bus.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A#First_personal_computer_with_a_16-bit_processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A#Fir...
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoYeah, 16-bit data bus but only 16-bit address bus. So still has the limitation of 64k memory which was really the chief defect of machines of that era.
- Narishma 10y agoI wouldn't call it a defect. It's just a limitation, which could and did get worked around to a certain extent with various bank switching schemes.
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoWell it was a hindrance and probably the chief reason people wanted to upgrade later to 16-bits. In reality a 6502 or Z80 at 1-3mhz with supporting circuity was probably fast enough for most people's needs, but the memory sizes and lack of 80 column displays gave those machines limited usefulness for the things people needed computers for at the time: word processing, home spreadsheets, etc.
- Narishma 10y agoThe contemporary of the Apple II and TRS-80 was the Commodore PET. The C64 came much later.
- arundelo 10y agoI'm talking about 8-bit microcomputers in general, from the late seventies to the mid-to-late eighties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_computer#Notable_home_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_computer#Notable_home_com... EDIT: I owned a Commodore 64 and a TRS-80 in the eighties, and used an Apple IIe at school. These were all programmable in Basic, and although the C64 was clearly the most powerful, they were all similar in power compared to, say, an Amiga.
- grhmc 10y agoFairly unrelated, but fun: "Don't mess with Texas" is a long-standing anti-littering campaign.
- dbg31415 10y ago* Don't Mess with Texas - Wikipedia || https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas "The campaign is credited with reducing litter on Texas highways roughly 72% between 1986 and 1990."
- nsxwolf 10y agoI've waited a long time to see a "real demo" on the TI-99/4A so this is just super cool to see.
- Severian 10y agoI spent many, many hours with my family's TI-99/4A. I think my parents got it from Radioshack, as we had a Realistic tape deck to store programs with it. It was the base model with the speech synthesizer. It was the first computer I had ever used, and learned to program in BASIC at around 6 or 7 years old. I don't think I would be interested in programming and electronic circuits (and by extension, electronic music composition) if it wasn't for that early exposure. This is a great demo to see. You almost never hear of the 99/4A anymore.
- DigitalJack 10y agoSimilar story here. Although I didn't get into programming until I got an Apple //e a few years later. I remember typing in a program on the 99/4A (a game called downhill ski or something like that) from BYTE magazine, or some such magazine. I remember the pain of debugging typos... The hours it took typing it in. I was expecting something like one of the cartridge games to pop out. I was quite disappointed with the fact that it was ascii, the character was a > or < sign, and the trees were asterisks. All I could think was it took a whole saturday to program that, and the result was not worth the effort. Years later when I got the Apple, my expectations had been tempered by the previous experience. Of interest is that my sister did not get into electronics or programming. We both played games on both computers, but took different paths in life. I'm not sure if she would say now that the computers had much impact on her life direction. She's a medical doctor now, fwiw. It's part of the reason I cringe whenever I hear someone on the internets pleading for information on how to teach their kid to program. I think being exposed to such environments is great, but it might just be that your kid is more suited to being a doctor, lawyer, teacher, fire fighter, what have you. There is a world of difference between "teaching my kid to program" vs "showing/exposing them to the awesome world of programming."
- morganvachon 10y agoI feel like you're my Doppelgänger, everything you just wrote mirrors my experience. I got mine at six years old in 1983.
- apo 10y agoGood times. I owned one of these. The TI-99/4A was never very popular, but there was one store called "The Bach Company" on San Antonio Road in Palo Alto that specialized in selling hardware and software for it. It's easy to forget just how hard it was to get software for a home computer in the early 1980s. If you had a modem, then you could use bulletin boards, but the first 300 baud models (plus required RS-232 interface) cost even more than the computer itself and so were out of reach for me at least. One of the things the Bach Company sold was 99/4A software on audio cassette. It was packaged in a plastic bag along with a paper printout brochure. Even though I was just a kid, looking back I'm amazed that it never once occurred to me that I could sell software the same way.
- ssambros 10y ago> there was one store called "The Bach Company" on San Antonio Road in Palo Alto I think the store is still there. I bought an HP 50g calculator from them on eBay with pickup a couple of years ago.
- pjmlp 10y agoOn my home town in Portugal the only BBS available could only take about 5 simultaneous connections, nevermind the outrageous prices for connecting outside the city center.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ddrager 10y agoOh wow, the TI-99/4A, I learned BASIC on this computer! If you didn't have the tape storage unit, which could save data onto an audio cassette, you had to re-type your program into the computer if the power went out or unit was reset. It also had an external voice processor as an addon which was really creepy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUPkCNcT1Yw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUPkCNcT1Yw
- 13of40 10y agoIt was my family's first computer and the one I wrote my first programs on. Three things that stuck in my craw about it were: 1. BASIC supported PEEK but there was no POKE. 2. You could save files to a disk but you had to remember the file names because there was no way to list them. 3. Lower case letters were just small versions of uppercase. For the last one, a year or so ago I actually found a dump of the Apple IIe font and hacked an emulated TI-99 to use it, and it worked and looked great, so I have no idea what they were thinking. Anyway, it's awesome to see them be able to squeeze so much out of it in this demo.
- nsxwolf 10y agoIf you plugged in the Mini Memory cartridge, it added a POKE command to TI BASIC. There was a common cartridge, "Disk Manager 2", which gave you common DOS-like disk management utilities. The lowercase font really was absurd. A few programs redefined them with much more pleasant fonts. The "Adventure" module for running the Scott Adams text adventures comes to mind.
- protomyth 10y agoWe had one at my high school with the speech synthesizer module. I spent quite a lot of time messing with that thing. Got it to do passible Dakota after a bit of work.
- mdb333 10y agothis makes me realize I need to get back up in the demo scene as well dust off my ol' TI-99 with speech and crush some Parsec!
- kens 10y agoThe TI-99/4A uses the TMS9900 16-bit processor. I looked it up on Wikipedia and was surprised to see that this chip requires a four-phase clock. Anyone know why it uses a four-phase clock? The reason I'm curious is that four-phase circuitry was a big thing in the late 1960s, used in mostly-forgotten early MOS computers such as the Autonetics D-200 and the Four-Phase Systems AL1 chip. But I'd be surprised to find TI using four-phase logic in 1976. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-phase_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-phase_logic
- Dya 10y agoHi all - this is Dya - I worked on the intro music for the megademo. There is now a real hardware recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U7j5o0bVPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U7j5o0bVPA