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> You may not remember the TI-99/4, although it was for a brief time the best-selling computer in America, I certainly remember it - the /4A was my first compu

by dalke 4y ago

> You may not remember the TI-99/4, although it was for a brief time the best-selling computer in America, I certainly remember it - the /4A was my first computer. My dad thought that 16-bit was the wave of the future, so chose it over the 8-bit machines of the era. I mean, he wasn't wrong, per se, but there was so much more available for the Apple 2. I learned "sprite" because of the BASIC manual that came with the machine. I didn't realize the term originated with Texas Instruments. I was surprised about "Danny Hillis, while working for Texas Instruments in the late 1970s" as I didn't realize he worked for TI. While the Wikipedia entry says "It was also used by Danny Hillis at Texas Instruments in the late 1970s", it doesn't Danny Hillis doesn't appear to have been employed by TI. From what I could tell, he was working at MIT, for Seymour Papert, on a TI sponsored project. I added the discussion section "Hillis and TI" to the relevant Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sprite_(computer_graphics)#Hillis_and_TI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sprite_(computer_graphics... . BTW, making games in TI BASIC with sprites was very easy. My most advanced was a Moon Lander clone. I used a sprite for the lander, hand-created shapes for each rotation, and with a flat ground I was soon done. .. though there was some jerkiness problem in how I handled sprite velocity updates, which I needed help to resolve.

DonHopkins 4y ago
The TI-99/4 had an implementation of Logo that supported sprites, originally written in Pascal by Gary Drescher at the MIT-AI Lab Logo Group. https://forums.atariage.com/topic/334110-anecdotes-on-the-creation-of-ti-logo/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/334110-anecdotes-on-the-cr... Reminiscences from Ed Hardebeck: Q: Anything you can tell me about your experience of the project? Did TI provide any specific design requirements? And was it developed on a TI minicomputer, as TI's internal projects tended to be? I'd be delighted to hear anything you can tell me about its creation and your experience with it. A: They didn't really except it had to work on the 99/4, the memory expansion was required of course. Originally it was a big flat black box that sat under the 99/4, bigger than the computer itself. The project was a joint effort with TI, MIT and the Lamplighter School in Dallas. The Logo interpreter itself was first written in Pascal by Gary Drescher. I was an undergrad at MIT when I started on it at the AI Lab Logo Group, later a staff employee. The first part of my job was to rewrite the Pascal interpreter in assembly language. Yes this was done on a TI-990 mini-computer which had the same instruction set, and well before we got an actual 99/4. Mark Gross wrote the turtle graphics, I wrote the sprite stuff and the shape and text editors you showed off. I'm glad you mentioned how the base machine had 256 whole bytes of RAM! (that's bytes kids, not MB or even KB). Even with the expansion we had to swap in and out chunks of the program (like the editors or the disk io routines) from the cartridge EPROM. I understand BASIC stored it's programs in the video memory (read/write was arduous), which left it even less graphics to work with. Another fascinating observation from Ed Hardebeck: After this my next job was working on Logo for the Apple II. I developed Sprite Logo, we made a hardware display board for the Apple II that contained a TMS9918A processor. This guy has one https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/03/boxing-sprite-logo/ https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/03/boxing-sprite-logo/ https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/04/lcsi-sprite-card/ https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/04/lcsi-sprite-card/ (so do I still), and even got it running https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/07/running-sprite-logo/ https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/07/running-sprite-logo/ Sprite Logo ("second-system syndrome" aside) I think was much better. All 32 sprites were turtles and could draw, even while moving. You could command them in (more-or-less) parallel with TELL, ALL and EACH commands. For more capabilities with the sprite shapes I made the SNAP command which copied the bitmap under the sprite into its shape, and STAMP which copied the shape to the bitmap underneath. Combined with motion, there were a lot of interesting things that could be done. [from the comments...] Yep, pretty much. Using the sprite/tile editor to design the sprites, then using the sprite data dumped to the Logo file as binary source for use in assembly program development, or so it seems to me. I briefly showed what this kind of "live" editing looks like in my video, here. TI Logo: TI-99/4A Sprites and Graphics Done Right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgf9IVLxuSU&t=1127s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgf9IVLxuSU&t=1127s [...] The BYTE Magazine review of several Logo implementations found in this issue... https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198208_Byte_Magazine_Vol_07-08_Logo.pdf https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198208_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0... ...concludes with, “Mr. Bynum also told me about about a second version of TI Logo that will be available before the end of the year. This version will include such enhancements as music capability, double-size sprites, a workspace almost twice as large as that of the first version, more extensive documentation, and the ability to print procedures via the RS-232C port. In addition, the new version will no longer "hang up" when it runs out of workspace, and BUTFIRST of a single-letter word will be an .empty word. (All other criticisms given here will still be valid.) These improvements will correct many of the current faults of TI Logo.” The entire issue is more or less dedicated to Logo, with several informative articles. Interestingly (and apparently coincidentally), Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar article, "High Resolution Sprite-Oriented Color Graphics" describes his design of a board for the Apple II utilizing a 9918a VDP, which he described at great length and in very positive terms (without ever mentioning the 99/4a.) https://archive.org/details/Hi-Res_Graphics_TMS9918_BYTE_0882 https://archive.org/details/Hi-Res_Graphics_TMS9918_BYTE_088...

by dalke 4y ago

DonHopkins 4y ago

The TI-99/4 had an implementation of Logo that supported sprites, originally written in Pascal by Gary Drescher at the MIT-AI Lab Logo Group. https://forums.atariage.com/topic/334110-anecdotes-on-the-creation-of-ti-logo/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/334110-anecdotes-on-the-cr... Reminiscences from Ed Hardebeck: Q: Anything you can tell me about your experience of the project? Did TI provide any specific design requirements? And was it developed on a TI minicomputer, as TI's internal projects tended to be? I'd be delighted to hear anything you can tell me about its creation and your experience with it. A: They didn't really except it had to work on the 99/4, the memory expansion was required of course. Originally it was a big flat black box that sat under the 99/4, bigger than the computer itself. The project was a joint effort with TI, MIT and the Lamplighter School in Dallas. The Logo interpreter itself was first written in Pascal by Gary Drescher. I was an undergrad at MIT when I started on it at the AI Lab Logo Group, later a staff employee. The first part of my job was to rewrite the Pascal interpreter in assembly language. Yes this was done on a TI-990 mini-computer which had the same instruction set, and well before we got an actual 99/4. Mark Gross wrote the turtle graphics, I wrote the sprite stuff and the shape and text editors you showed off. I'm glad you mentioned how the base machine had 256 whole bytes of RAM! (that's bytes kids, not MB or even KB). Even with the expansion we had to swap in and out chunks of the program (like the editors or the disk io routines) from the cartridge EPROM. I understand BASIC stored it's programs in the video memory (read/write was arduous), which left it even less graphics to work with. Another fascinating observation from Ed Hardebeck: After this my next job was working on Logo for the Apple II. I developed Sprite Logo, we made a hardware display board for the Apple II that contained a TMS9918A processor. This guy has one https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/03/boxing-sprite-logo/ https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/03/boxing-sprite-logo/ https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/04/lcsi-sprite-card/ https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/04/lcsi-sprite-card/ (so do I still), and even got it running https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/07/running-sprite-logo/ https://www.bluerwhite.org/2014/07/running-sprite-logo/ Sprite Logo ("second-system syndrome" aside) I think was much better. All 32 sprites were turtles and could draw, even while moving. You could command them in (more-or-less) parallel with TELL, ALL and EACH commands. For more capabilities with the sprite shapes I made the SNAP command which copied the bitmap under the sprite into its shape, and STAMP which copied the shape to the bitmap underneath. Combined with motion, there were a lot of interesting things that could be done. [from the comments...] Yep, pretty much. Using the sprite/tile editor to design the sprites, then using the sprite data dumped to the Logo file as binary source for use in assembly program development, or so it seems to me. I briefly showed what this kind of "live" editing looks like in my video, here. TI Logo: TI-99/4A Sprites and Graphics Done Right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgf9IVLxuSU&t=1127s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgf9IVLxuSU&t=1127s [...] The BYTE Magazine review of several Logo implementations found in this issue... https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198208_Byte_Magazine_Vol_07-08_Logo.pdf https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198208_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0... ...concludes with, “Mr. Bynum also told me about about a second version of TI Logo that will be available before the end of the year. This version will include such enhancements as music capability, double-size sprites, a workspace almost twice as large as that of the first version, more extensive documentation, and the ability to print procedures via the RS-232C port. In addition, the new version will no longer "hang up" when it runs out of workspace, and BUTFIRST of a single-letter word will be an .empty word. (All other criticisms given here will still be valid.) These improvements will correct many of the current faults of TI Logo.” The entire issue is more or less dedicated to Logo, with several informative articles. Interestingly (and apparently coincidentally), Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar article, "High Resolution Sprite-Oriented Color Graphics" describes his design of a board for the Apple II utilizing a 9918a VDP, which he described at great length and in very positive terms (without ever mentioning the 99/4a.) https://archive.org/details/Hi-Res_Graphics_TMS9918_BYTE_0882 https://archive.org/details/Hi-Res_Graphics_TMS9918_BYTE_088...