Nice machine and overview, thanks for sharing! It looks brand new. A beige 4/A just like this was my family's first machine when I was about 5 or 6. Loved Parsec, Tunnels of Doom, Hunt the Wumpus, TI Logo, Moon Patrol, Popeye... The AtariSoft games were generally better than the official TI ones. Now that I think about it, we must have had the 1981 ROM since the unlicensed carts worked. 25:17 It is possible to "hot swap" carts without power cycling the machine, but in practice I never did it because it feels wrong. 26:16 The black and silver models had a sliding trap door but the cost reduced versions did not so far as I know. 29:38 Yea, the keyboard is a bit of a mess, but you get used to it pretty quickly and at least it HAS key modifiers unlike e.g. the TRS-80 CoCos. 32:34 You can use your TEII cart with a speech synthesizer, it adds allophone-based text-to-speech to TI Basic! 35:08 As you've discovered, playing Parsec with the keyboard is nearly impossible because you can't fire and move at the same time :( Looking forward to the next episode!
Love this comment so much! Great info and now pinned for everyone to see. Can't wait to try some of the games you mention. I believe I heard you could hot swap carts, but like you, just seems wrong and fraught with disaster. Probably the Commodore guy coming out.
Thank you for not trashing the TI. I started on the TI, and was very proficient with it. I was expecting a commie guy to talk bad about the quirks, but you were fair. Thanks. Great video.
Thanks for subscribing and joining us from the land down under. The TI has been fun to play with. More content coming but I do have some additional Commodore video coming. Have you checked out the MEGA65?
Emulators are hit and miss for me. I like the real hardware and keyboards so there is no trying to figure out what PC keys emulate retro keys. Still, emulators can be a convenient and inexpensive way to experience these machines. For me, the 80s nostalgia is still important. Thanks for watching!
I have an emulator on my laptop. Not only does it include lots of software from popular cartridges but it also captures the unique programming architecture I remember so well from 1981. It was a great foundation for playing with 286s and 386s in high school. Every time I ran into “DOS block” I could think around the corner.
@@retroCombs In the first half of the '80s - C64, ZX Spectrum, very, vrey few Orics... Later Amiga and Atari ST, and then, at the turn of the decade PCs
@@retroCombs And we (Yugoslavia then, but in Croatia really), ee had our own computer - "Orao" (Eagle). If I remember correctly, it was Z80 with 16K of RAM. The government was so protective of it that the import taxes on foreign computers were more expensive than computers. It had a very good basic, but very few games ...
I still need to find a speech synthesizer. They are very hard to find. I'm kind of surprised that the TIPI folks haven't found some way to integrate this feature into that device.
Great find! Might if I ask how much you paid? The only TI I saw for sale at the show was a bundle that included the expansion box and floppy drive. That one was listed for $450, which was a little too much for a new hobby machine.
I have a beige model 99/4A I bought in 2007 with a Vic 20 and accessories I think I remember paying like $30 or less for the lot. It’s crazy how it’s it has shot up in price since 2007. I found the TTS synthesizer box in 2021 for around a dollar? The last time I turned mine on it had issues with the display where it would be fine as I turned it on but the screen would be garbled up all over the place…wonder if something needs to be re-soldered?
Prices for all retro-computers have shot up! I'm embarrassed to admit what I recently paid for an AMIGA 600, but it was on the list! Your TI display issue is common. I don't have a lot of experience troubleshooting the TI 99/4A, but there's lots of great info online.
Looking at the specs on the companion blog post, I can't help but wonder why the expandability of this machine was only to 56k. Is the 16 bit CPU not able to address more by design or oversight?
From the research, the motherboard was designed for an 8-bit processor. TI slammed their 16 bit on board despite the limitations. Others may have a different story to share but that's what I understood.
Was unfamiliar with this computer my Myarc. Just did some research. Very interesting but looks like a very short shelf life and hard to find nowadays. Thanks for sharing. I learned something new!
@@retroCombs The MEMOTECH MTX 512 which is can take the MEMOTECH HDX512 and MEMOTECH FDX512 actually has assembler and you can do... ASSEM 10 ENTER to start entering machine code CLS RETURN CLS RETURN to leave assembler but you can do LIST RET to look at the BASIC and machine code together the only other 8BIT PC with assembler was the BBC MODEL B then you would be able to mix assembler and BASIC in one program.
@@retroCombs The TI 990 was a minicomputer line that shared the same instruction set with the TI-99. There were some later cost reduced 990's that were microprocessor based -- the 990/4 only had 56k, but the 990/10 could be up to a MB.
Mislav, Just noticed your support on this video! You are sneaking those supports in all over the place! 😄 As always, much appreciated. I'm working on a supporter page for the blog and determining a way to share in videos. You have definitely earned your place!
TI slit their own throat's on this machine though strange design and by blocking out 3rd party hardware and software developers. They got what they deserved in my opinion. TI BASIC was near useless and to use their extended BASIC you had to buy extra hardware and a cartridge. It even couldn't stack up against MS BASIC of the time. However, since then the retro market has stepped up. There is a lot out their available through dedicated fans that actually makes the platform almost what TI could have let it become back in the day if their executives weren't such a bunch of dicks. I got a pristine example of the 99/4A in the stainless and black 3 years ago for $25 (there is a story to that). Out of the box it's pretty useless, but with a few modern add-ons it's quite a pleasant pastime. Kudos to those that came after TI.
@@retroCombs I know very little about the TIPI, but don't you need a PEB to use one? The CF7 is simple and effective. I modified my FinalGROM to provide power to the CF7 in order to simplify the set-up a bit so you just need to one power brick.
It was the NO LIKE FOR YOU that led me down the negative road. Apologies for misreading and I'll take a good leg pull any day! 😀 Your other post had great info about why you felt TI meet there own demise. I have it an email if you want me to share it.
