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[sometimes99er]

How do you rate other early eighties home computers and their communities ?

When I compare systems sold in the millions, like Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, Apple, Coleco and MSX, the TI seems severely lumping decades behind. Okay, this forum was about games and programming for a while, but has been taken over by the same stuff and attitude that drive th Yahoo lists. Other than that, the TI Basic is super slow and you don't have access to peek and poke, let alone machine code.

Wanting to be more of a game designer with all what comes with it, I think I'm in the mood for a change for something with more fun to it. What do you suggest ?

Edited December 18, 2014 by sometimes99er

[+Gemintronic]

I'd try to rate them by how useful they were to end users in different categories. You know, home office, games, graphic arts, music and so forth. Out of your mentioned systems C64 and MSX systems would be my best bet.

[RobertLM78]

I can't say I could fairly rate the ZX Spectrum, Coleco, or MSX as I never had any experience on them. We had a '99 growing up and I still have one now. Additionally I used C64s at our church for many years. I'd have to say I think the C64 is better in many ways, but at the end of the day the TI was the first computer I ever used, so I'm a bit partial to it despite its drawbacks . As I'm getting back into computing on the TI, I feel keen on pushing the thing to it's limits, and it seems like I came at the right time - as Tursi put it in response to http://atariage.com/...he-cool-demos/:

...but we're only starting to push the TI in the last few years, IMO. ...

Edit: Out of curiosity Sometimes, I assume the ratings of BASIC are the "stock" versions? I noticed you gave TI's BASIC two stars, which I'd agree with for the "stock" version, but Extended BASIC I'd have to give three stars .

Edited May 15, 2013 by RobertLM78

[sometimes99er]

Thanks for feedback so far. Interesting to hear what seems important, where you're coming from etc.

 

Out of curiosity Sometimes, I assume the ratings of BASIC are the "stock" versions?

 

Yep.

[Opry99er]

The TI is certainly my favorite, but I experienced many early 80a computers and developed opinions on most of them.

 

I think my perception is skewed because I had every standard peripheral imaginable as a kid, so I had a fully expanded TI, WITH all bells and whistles. I'd have to rate "sound" and graphics SLIGHTLY higher than you did, because I had some great experiences with games like Parsec and Tunnels of Doom... (Par sec for graphics and speech.... You just never forget that woman telling you "SHIPS APPROACHING" and watching the sparkly pixel scrolling....) ToD for music, along with other programs which really pushed the sound chip.

 

Your comparisons are good there... I can't speak to the Spectrum, and I'd rate the TI slightly higher in the above-categories, but nice table there.

 

Owen

[+save2600]

TI (thanks to its built in BASIC and wonderful Extended BASIC cart) was vastly easier to get into and program than any other machine IMO.

 

When looking through the old computing mags of the time, you'll see what I mean. C64, etc. programs would have little in the way of anything understandable, unless you were writing/typing in a simple utility. For games programming, C64/A8 and the Apple mostly had you typing in machine data values and you specified where the program started and ended in memory. Boring exercise in typing typically and didn't always explain what was what or how/why something worked.

 

Programming the TI was definitely a more intuitive experience, for me anyway. Mini Memory even made assembly language more compelling than the other computers.

 

Currently have both a TI and a C64 set up. I have almost zero interest in doing much of anything on the C64 besides gaming (that may change someday?), but am still enamored with both the keyboard and the programming capabilities of the TI. Just seems a more impressive machine somehow, considering its capabilities maybe. And there's something "unsettling" about some of the sounds that SID puts out. I didn't feel this way back in the day, but today for some reason... not sure if I can verbalize it as well as I feel, but it's almost as if the SID (or some/most of the way it generates sound) doesn't "fit" with the age/era of the C64 or maybe its graphics. Don't get me wrong... it's an awesome chip and sounds great, but the smooth waveform "flow" that many games utilize, just sound "wrong" sometimes - for a computer or arcade game. I don't feel that way with Amiga's Paula at all. There's just something about the C64/SID that's weird at times.

 

When it comes to overall fun factors, whether or not a particular machine specs out better than another is irrelevant to me. That said, I'd still rate the TI as the most compelling computer of its time. C64 is way up there and the Amiga too of course. Never had a Spectrum or MSX.

Edited May 15, 2013 by save2600

[Opry99er]

I also think that a comparison between the C64 and the 4A is a bit unfair. Technology was advancing so rapidly at the time and the 64 was of a different "generation" than the 4A .

 

The general architecture for our beloved TI was in place in 79/80 and the C64 came along a few years after... (IIRC)

 

It's tough to compare the NES to the Sega Genesis in terms of graphics and capabilities... That may be an improper analogy, but I think you get where Im coming from.

[slinkeey]

When looking through the old computing mags of the time, you'll see what I mean. C64, etc. programs would have little in the way of anything understandable, unless you were writing/typing in a simple utility. For games programming, C64/A8 and the Apple mostly had you typing in machine data values and you specified where the program started and ended in memory. Boring exercise in typing typically and didn't always explain what was what or how/why something worked.

 

Don't even get my wife started on this. She said that her dad used to have her type in pages of what she called "numbers" into her Dad's C64 back in the 80's. I said, are you sure it wasn't pages of print statements and etc. She said no, because at least then she would know if she mispelled something from context.

[matthew180]

TI BASIC is just too painfully slow. Although XB helped in that aspect, it was still much slower than most other home computers of the time. The MSX would have been awesome at the time since it really represents everything I remember from all the various machines of the era. The MSX has a DOS, a BASIC that does what you expect and gives you low-level access if you need it, and Konami really showed what the 9918A was capable of. If anyone has not played Nightmare on a real MSX1, I highly recommend you find a way to try it.

 

Even though I only had a 99/4A, I really liked most of systems back then. I never saw the C64 other than on store shelves, but my aunt and uncle had an Apple2e and I loved it when we would visit them. It seemed the Apple could do so much more and had all these great graphical games, and Lode Runner!

 

Still, everything was happening so fast and each system was so unique that it was fun just to explore each one. It is also hard to objectively compare the systems now, having an "adult's perspective" and technical knowledge vs. "back then" when I was walking around in a technical glaze. I loved the arcade coin-ops and I would come home and try to write them on my 99/4A. I loved getting the PEB for xmas and learning 9900 assembly. I loved going to the computer store in the local mall and running down the line of home computers, and going to the grocery store with my mom where I would go check out all the computer magazines while she shopped. I would compare the 99/4A graphics to the other systems and sometimes I was happy since they looked the best, and other times some other system looked better. I spent countless hours playing ToD and played my first text adventure (Pirate Adventure) on the 99/4A, and I drooled over the exotic graphics from expensive computers I had never heard of. 512x512 pixels with 1024 colors!!! And when TRON came out, I was forever influenced by the computer graphics (hence my avatar).

 

I think all of that is called "reminiscing" and the reason most of us are here. :-) That feeling of wonderment is also gone today in the world of disposable technology and million dollar AAA games that look like movies. My kids will never remember their first video game, and they will probably never dig out a PS3 in 20 years to play a game with fond memories. I wonder if there is anything that replaces that "magic" for kids today?

 

On the chart, I would change "CPU" to "system" since the 9900 was capable of waaay more performance than you can get out of it in the 99/4A due to the crippling design. BASIC needs to be compared in two categories: 1. usability (max stars), and 2. performance (min stars). The C64 would probably be opposite, and the MSX would get max stars. I never had and MSX growing up, but I got one to test the F18A in, and I really enjoy the system.

Edited May 15, 2013 by matthew180

[unhuman]

I'm pretty much in agreement. I probably learned far more than my friends who had non-TI's as kids... I could write and understand almost everything I saw (as someone else mentioned), but the ability to write something "good" was always a challenge. Games on the TI were generally pretty poor compared to what was produced for C64, Atari, and Apple II.

[Opry99er]

Yea, after the TI, the Apple was my favorite, without a doubt.

[RobertLM78]

....I think all of that is called "reminiscing" and the reason most of us are here. :-) That feeling of wonderment is also gone today in the world of disposable technology and million dollar AAA games that look like movies. My kids will never remember their first video game, and they will probably never dig out a PS3 in 20 years to play a game with fond memories. I wonder if there is anything that replaces that "magic" for kids today?.....

Hehehe - yeah, nostalgia is a powerful thing when it comes to these old computers . Although I really hope that my son will one day pull his first computer out and mess around with it (he hasn't actually got his first computer, yet (he's about a year away from that) Daddy's still using it ). It's a Pentium IV running Linux Mint, with a descent suite of educational and development software, and I hope it gives him that spark. I don't care if he doesn't go back to his first game console, but I do care if he goes back to his first computer. And, of course, I've got an extra TI console which he may wind up using as well - although sadly I don't have any of the educational software that we had as kids. Lack of foresight had me leaving those at my parents house when I moved out - and they have since been discarded .

[+mizapf]

With discussions like these I sometimes ask myself whether we would have done better in some way, judging in hindsight.

 

Suppose we had the same hardware pieces (CPU, VDP, sound, 9901).

 

One thing that we already agreed on is that the separation of video and CPU RAM contributes much to the bad performance, where other 8-bit systems mapped their video RAM into the CPU address space. Would this have been an option for our system? I think the issue begins already with the approach to use this video co-processor. It sounds reasonable at first, though.

 

First, the VDP RAM is organized differently to the RAM in the CPU space. AFAIK the VDP includes a memory controller, implementing refresh cycles on its own, while the RAM in the CPU space must be SRAM or - as found in the 32 KiB expansion card - DRAM with an own memory refresh circuitry.

 

Second, the VDP is a kind of processor on its own, so the memory would become a shared resource. This would imply some coordination for memory access from the VDP and from the CPU. Also, the VDP must access the RAM for composing the video image all the time.

 

Third, where would we have mapped the video RAM? There must be an area for the operating system (Monitor), which essentially realizes a virtual (GPL) machine in our case (how ironic that GPL looks much like an 8-bit system). Where should we reserve a 16 KiB area for the VDP? Maybe at the top of memory (C000-FFFF), which leaves only 8 KiB (A000-BFFF) for programs. Not a good idea. Maybe a full 16 KiB window is just too large.

 

An alternative would be to use a window of 4 KiB, e.g. in 3000-3fff, with 4 banks, using CRU to switch between them. This would have meant to reorganize memory as 16 * 4 KiB so that this area could have been reserved.

 

Your ideas?

 

Michael

[matthew180]

Coin-op arcade games are a good place to look for ways to do those sorts of things. The VRAM is external to the 9918A so it could be accessed by some other CPU. The problem is, as you mentioned, that the 9918A controls the refresh cycles, so there is no way to coordinate dual access.

 

The Williams board set that was used for games like Defender, Joust, Bubbles, Robotron, and Sinistar have 48K or dedicated video RAM, plus 64K ROM space and uses a 6809. The way the VRAM is shared between the video subsystem and the CPU is very elegant. Basically the DRAM (same TI chips we have in the 99/4A) are twice as fast as the CPU's memory cycle, and the whole system is driven from a synchronous clock. Every half cycle of a 1MHz clock (yeah, the CPU was only running at 1MHz, but look what could be done) the CPU gets VRAM access, then the video circuit gets access for the other half of the cycle. Also, since the video circuit addresses the *entire* 48K of VRAM it acts as a refresh as well. Very slick. Thus the CPU gets unrestricted full-speed access to the VRAM and does not even know the video generator is in there.

 

To get enough RAM and ROM, the full 48K could be swapped for ROM. Thus >0000 to >BFFF was ROM or RAM depending on a flip-flop that was memory mapped and could be set by writing a 1 or 0 to a specific address. Memory >Cxxx is the memory-mapped space, and >D000 to >FFFF (12K) was always ROM. Sound is done with a completely separate CPU with its own ROM and 8-bit DAC. I really like it as a computer system and it would have made a kick-ass home computer. :-) 308x240 16-color per-pixel bitmap display, programmable palette registers, and a hardware blitter! Fun!

 

To do a similar thing with the 9918A you would need some way to shut off the refresh control and synchronize the memory access, and I don't think that is possible. Also, to clock the DRAM fast enough for a 3MHz CPU you would need a 150ns or so access time, which back then would have cost a lot of money. Today that would be pretty easy.

 

Definitely the 64K address limit of the 8-bit CPUs, and even the 9900, was a detriment and some sort of built-in standard banking was absolutely necessary. The MSX has a memory mapper built-in which makes standard expansion much easier. I also think that is the main advantage the 8088 and 8086 had over other CPUs of the day (a 20-bit address space) and contributed to the domination of the "PC". I also read somewhere in one of my older (like 70's) hardware design books that a balanced system should have about 1MB of RAM per MHz of CPU speed. So most home computers of the day needed about 3MB of RAM. :-)

 

[senior_falcon]

I found an Atari 800XL system at a rummage sale back in the '90s. This was a complete system with two disk drives, a printer and a bunch of software. I always liked the way this computer looked with its black and silver case. I think it was the best looking computer of that time, even better than the TI. The disk drives worked fine and I had no complaints about the speed. (I remember hearing that the C64 was very slow.) The printer was a 7 pin dot matrix, meaning that lower case y ang g looked kind of funny but it worked fine. I played around with the built in BASIC and thought it was easy enough to use. Bit mapped graphics were built into BASIC with provision for placing pixels and drawing lines - I don't remember if there were any other bit mapped functions than these. I had no trouble writing a program in BASIC that worked just like LINES for the TI. The player/missile graphics were a bit different than the TI and strings were handled differently. As I recall a string was kept as an array. I didn't spend a lot of time learning about it, but it is definitely an interesting piece of computing history.

[sometimes99er]

I think I got the Atari 800XL just moments before getting the C64, which had by then dropped considerably in price. Everybody was getting the C64 here in Denmark, I guess the ZX Spectrum was bigger in the UK, but I wanted something cooler, so Atari, with more colors it was. The C64 was now all over me, and I couldn't find anything for the Atari (locally - it being Copenhagen). I had to give in.

 

[+mizapf]

Definitely the 64K address limit of the 8-bit CPUs, and even the 9900, was a detriment and some sort of built-in standard banking was absolutely necessary. The MSX has a memory mapper built-in which makes standard expansion much easier. I also think that is the main advantage the 8088 and 8086 had over other CPUs of the day (a 20-bit address space) and contributed to the domination of the "PC".

 

Right. The problem persists in the Geneve architecture, due to the 9995 being just an improvement of the 9900, not another architecture. While the Geneve comes with 640 KiB RAM, you can only access 64 KiB at a time, just like the TI. We do have a mapper that is used to map 8 KiB portions of the complete memory into the address space at 8 K boundaries, so one might think that this should allow for using all of the space in a free way, but this is actually not possible without explicit control. That is, memory access is not transparent to the program; we need to include commands to change the mapper values.

 

The magic comes with the address width. The PC, for a long time, had a larger address space than real memory. This is what you need to implement virtual memory management. In recent years, we can now buy PCs with more than 4 GiB of RAM, which exceeds the 32 bit width of the ALU; this is an incentive to go for newer 64 bit systems. On the other side, the TI with its memory expansions, and the Geneve always had a smaller address space than memory.

[akator]

I recall the Apple II and TRS-80s being very easy to program for because their implementation of BASIC seemed to be very robust and straightforward. I also found the Timex Sinclair / ZX-81 very easy to program for, that is if the membrane keyboard and loose memory module connection could be overlooked.

 

My attempts to program for the Atari computers were not extensive enough to know much except that most of what I could do on the other machines didn't work on the Atari.

 

But the Atari was nothing compared to the misery of learning to program on the C64. Nothing about the Commodore was straightforward to me, proven by the obnoxious and unforgiving disk commands when compared to the others systems I had experienced. Everything seemed amazingly overcomplicated to do exactly the same tasks. Peeks and pokes, memory mapping, machine language subroutines were all nice to know on the other machines but not absolutely necessary to create a slow but functional BASIC program -- but not on the C64. In my situation, it was also much more difficult to find the charts and references for the C64, these would show up everywhere a few years later but by that time I wasn't interested in programming on the C64 anymore.

 

These days, with massive abundance of programming and reference materials available on the web, I don't find the Commodore computers that difficult to deal with. They are still someone obtuse and not always straightforward, requiring access to those references, but not actually difficult. I can still understand why they frustrated the hell out me in the early 80s.

 

I am looking forward to programming more on the Atari computers, something I haven't tried in 30 years. But I'm not done playing with the VIC-20 yet

 

And to bring things back around to the 4A, I have absolutely no programming experience on it at all to compare to the other systems.

 

So... if I was going to introduce someone to programming classic computers, I think they would enjoy the Apple II because it's pretty straightforward and results are easy to obtain. I like everything I've read about the Atari 8-bit computers, and I think that would be my second choice or the next machine to "graduate" to from the Apple II. I don't know if I could ever recommend the Commodore machines because I still don't find programming them to be nearly as much fun as the Apple II, and fun should really be an important part of programming any of these old machines these days

Edited May 16, 2013 by akator

[+adamantyr]

TI BASIC slow? Yes. But it's a LOT easier to learn than any other BASIC language out there.

 

The "BASIC for Beginners" book is actually a very well written manual on learning to program for people who had never used a computer before. Which was basically the entire market at the time. In that, I think TI erred on the positive side. While BASIC was clunky and slow compared to the raw implementations on other machines, it was easy to learn and it boxed away some of the more complicated and confusing parts of how computers worked.

 

The biggest problem that TI had was you really had no easy upgrade path. Extended BASIC cost $100 back in the early 80's (Around $300 today, the cost of a non-discounted copy of MS Office or Visual Studio) and didn't immediately offer more memory, just more features and slightly faster operation. (In fact, you LOST memory with Extended BASIC on the bare bones console...) To get the 32k expansion required an enormous commitment of money that most users didn't have, since you had to get the Peripheral Expansion Box as well. And assembly language? Well, either the Mini-Memory (eclectic, hard to use, very user un-friendly) or the Editor/Assembler (expensive, full system needed) were required, and you had almost NO materials on programming in the relatively unknown TMS9900 language. Compare this to other 8-bit systems where all your RAM was in the console and TI is definitely looking like the wrong choice for a consumer who wants to expand their programming potential.

 

If I had to rate a particular set of BASICS for power AND ease of use, I'd say that Tandy BASIC (TRS Model I-III, TRS-80 CoCo) and Apple's BASIC were the best. They still had good syntax and structure, but they also had machine language access with POKE and PEEK allowing you to accomplish some real cool stuff.

 

Adamantyr

[+retroclouds]

Too bad the Extended Basic cartridge did not have 4K of battery backed-up RAM as the mini memory had. Using the 4K for assembly routines while the extended basic program runs from VDP would have been a cool thing if you ask me (surely for those people without 32K memory expansion)

[Tursi]

Could have been done, but the XB cart already had 12k of ROM on it, and the RAM would have added more cost.

 

Still, yeah.. some default assembly on the TI would have been nice, nobody would have cared as much about the speed of BASIC.

 

[+adamantyr]

Probably the ONE thing that would have made the TI more viable was to add CPU RAM to the console in the 4A revision. Had they done that (Even just 8k into the lower RAM section), history may have turned out differently. Add a memory mapper so you could do paged amounts of RAM and the sky would have been the limit.

 

Mind you, it's hard to remember at times that the TI-99/4 architecture was designed in the late 70's. The Commodore 64 benefited from coming years later, when RAM had gone down in price considerably and you could afford to stick 64k in machines.

 

The TI-99/8's design (paged memory, refined CPU, 128k base) shows they KNEW what they needed to do; the TI-99/4 and 4a were just their throwaways. They just took too long and the market crashed before they could get it out. Pity.

 

Adamantyr

[Asmusr]

 

Probably mostly known in Europe, but I would have included the Amstrad CPC 464 in the table (a.k.a. Schneider in Germany and the Arnold in France). This was the computer I went for after the TI, in 1984. It was Z80 based with 64K RAM, and it came with a color monitor as standard and a built-in tape drive. It had three bitmap modes (640x200 - 2 colors, 320x200 - 4 colors, and 160x200 - 16 colors (out of 27)). It had a great Basic in ROM and easy access to machine code. The sound was also pretty good, but could not compete with the C64. I think its biggest problem was the lack of sprites and scroll registers, and the decision to use non-standard 3" floppy disks.

[JamesD]

If I had to rate a particular set of BASICS for power AND ease of use, I'd say that Tandy BASIC (TRS Model I-III, TRS-80 CoCo) and Apple's BASIC were the best. They still had good syntax and structure, but they also had machine language access with POKE and PEEK allowing you to accomplish some real cool stuff.

Level II BASIC and Model III BASIC (mostly the same) were two of the best BASICs for business. They supported integers, single and double precision numbers.

Most 6502, 680X, and later Z80 versions I've seen use single precision for all numbers.

The use of integers made the TRS-80 BASIC benchmark fairly fast in spite of their lower clock speeds vs most other Z80 machines which were clocked closer to 4MHz.

I think most non-TRS-80 Microsoft BASICs lack the ELSE and INKEY$ commands. ELSE lets you write much smaller code so it's omission has a huge impact.

 

The Atari version of Microsoft BASIC appears to match the TRS-80 versions feature wise, probably the only 6502 version to do so, but it's late introduction prevented it from becoming popular. Regular Atari BASIC lacks a lot of string handling features and is missing some commands for file I/O even though the code was in the ROM. I use one of the OSS versions which fixes some of the problems with Atari BASIC.

 

One of the best things about Applesoft II is that it had a lot of patches for it. You could access extra RAM, add the ELSE command, and many other features.

You could also run Integer BASIC on the Apple which worked well for a lot of games. The Language Card and hacker nature of the Apple II invited such mods.

 

The VZ/Laser 110/200/300/etc... use a hacked Level II BASIC ROM with some commands disabled.

I patched a ROM to re-enable most of the tokens (as have other people) but I believe double precision was one of the things that couldn't be re-enabled.

It's too bad they neutered the ROM and hardware so much, these machines were pretty fast TRS-80 clones at heart.

 

I believe the NEC Trek (PC-6001) used a Microsoft BASIC very similar to the CoCo and it even offered an Extended Color Basic upgrade. I'm sure it shared a lot of code with the TRS-80 version.

 

The Tandy MC-10 has one of the most complete 8K BASICs made. It had as many or more features than larger 6502 versions.

 

I haven't used TI BASIC much but I didn't really care for the ANSI BASIC syntax as much after using several other BASICs.

 

Sinclair BASIC's parser can pull off some neat tricks but at the cost of speed. It's a real challenge to create the most optimal code.

 

MSX BASIC syntax reminds me of the Panasonic JR-200 BASIC... but I haven't used either enough to really know how close they are.

 

I've never used Acorn or Amstrad's BASICs. From what I hear, Acorn's BASIC is very fast.

 

The ORIC had a pretty decent BASIC. The sound commands for special effects were unique as far as I know.

[+Vorticon]

TI BASIC slow? Yes. But it's a LOT easier to learn than any other BASIC language out there.

 

The "BASIC for Beginners" book is actually a very well written manual on learning to program for people who had never used a computer before. Which was basically the entire market at the time. In that, I think TI erred on the positive side. While BASIC was clunky and slow compared to the raw implementations on other machines, it was easy to learn and it boxed away some of the more complicated and confusing parts of how computers worked.

 

 

To this day I am extremely fond of that manual because it gave me my first glimpse at programming, and I have yet to see a better introductory manual to BASIC for any other system. And while slow, TI BASIC was still quite a capable language. As a matter of fact, it was all I used from 1981 to 1986 because I could not afford to expand my TI beyond the main console (I did however have access to powerful mainframes both at the high school and college, and so learned Fortran and Pascal on the side). By 1986 however, I had the choice to affordably upgrade the TI from the Triton catalogue or get my hands on an IBM PC, and it turned out that the latter (with only 256k and CGA graphics) was just about the same price than adding a PEB, drives, P-Code, 32K ram etc..., so that's how I went. It was not until 1996 that I went back to the TI out of nostalgia...

 

The early 80's was a fantastic era, vibrant with all the cool systems out there with their associated magazines, user groups, and programming fever. Now, it's just dull, so we go back to the old systems and try to recreate that lost excitement, with varied success. Which is why attending events like the Chicago TI Faire is so special, because for just a day, you can pretend that it's 1982 all over again