Time for an update....

In the year since my last TI99 update post to this blog, a lot has happened in my TI99 life. I bought a lot of games and cartridges for it. I bought a defective speech module from ebay that I got working. My floppy drives started to act funny, so I cleaned them and replaced the belts, but my DSK1 was still not working well, as determined by the disk manager II test utility. So, I went on a bit of an upgrade mode. Just for fun, I replaced all of the PEB LEDs with bright blue ones, and they look good. I swapped out my DSK2 to be DSK1 and replaced the LED in it too. The original DSK1 is a tandon type, and is still acting up. I am trying to replace it with some other type of floppy drive. The original DSK2, now DSK1, is the other type, MSI I think is the manufacturer, I forget the exact name.

I then decided to upgrade the 4a as well. I did the alpha lock fix, the video fix, took out the power supply and added a plug so that I can use an old AT power supply as I figure it would give better voltages and voltage protection. I added a blue LED to it as well.

Everything works fine, my only complaint is that the super bright LEDs I used look amazing in the PEB, as it has the small bezel that the light must shine through. On the 4a, it is too bright and a bit irritating....lol....so I placed a small piece of scotch tape on it for now... :-)

I also bought a navarone port expander, so now I can have my extended basic, disk manager II, and another cart plugged in and simply move the selector switch. I love it.

Also bought a Foundation 128K card. I got excited, thinking I could add 128K to the 4a, but alas, the card works as a 4 bank 32K card and in normal mode only works as a 32k card. Certain programs can take advantage of the other three banks to allow for a total of 128k. One such program is rapid copy, which apparently uses all the ram as a swap drive to help cut down on copying times. I still need to try this, which was included with the card.

Next on my list is to make an RS232 Y cable, and try to get this thing to tele-bbs somewhere.

I tried copying some cassette games to disk, only to find out the TI99 has a protection system built in to cut down on piracy. ARGH. There are probably ways to do it, just not high on my list right now to try and find out.

That's it for this posting....

Thanks for your time!