The Texas Instruments TI99/4a was my first own computer.
I got it right after TI announced the end of the production, and prices for the system dropped sharply, I think somewhere around 1983 or so...
It had 16kB of ram (about 13 under Extended Basic), and all the C=64 guys were laughing at me...
I owned a bunch of the standard games (and some I typed in from the german magazines Computer Kontakt and Computer Praxis), and the all-important TI Extended Basic cartridge.
My largest project was a tool to register the inventory in my parent's company, and print lists for the tax office.
As the bitmap graphics accessible from TI basic were minimal, I wrote one of the (at the time) popular mandelbrot graphics generators, which created the graphics directly on the Epson RX/80 dot matrix printer we had. Calculating one 9-pixel line needed about two hours...
Of the games, my favourite were (non-surprisingly) Parsec (cache), MunchMan (cache), Video Chess (cache), and Tombstone City.
Here's an original picture of the TI running parsec on my parent's old b/w TV, together with the best Joystick of all times, the Competition Pro.
There are a couple of TI99 sites on the net:
...and lots more, just ask Google.
I got it right after TI announced the end of the production, and prices for the system dropped sharply, I think somewhere around 1983 or so...
It had 16kB of ram (about 13 under Extended Basic), and all the C=64 guys were laughing at me...
I owned a bunch of the standard games (and some I typed in from the german magazines Computer Kontakt and Computer Praxis), and the all-important TI Extended Basic cartridge.
My largest project was a tool to register the inventory in my parent's company, and print lists for the tax office.
As the bitmap graphics accessible from TI basic were minimal, I wrote one of the (at the time) popular mandelbrot graphics generators, which created the graphics directly on the Epson RX/80 dot matrix printer we had. Calculating one 9-pixel line needed about two hours...
Of the games, my favourite were (non-surprisingly) Parsec (cache), MunchMan (cache), Video Chess (cache), and Tombstone City.
Here's an original picture of the TI running parsec on my parent's old b/w TV, together with the best Joystick of all times, the Competition Pro.
There are a couple of TI99 sites on the net:
- 99er (cache), with lots of software and hardware infos (and links to emulators)
- Area 99 (cache)
- TI 99/4a Videogame House (cache) with lots of info on TI99 games
...and lots more, just ask Google.
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