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TI-99 Photos Thread! Post your systems here!


slinkeey

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- on 03 May 2018 - 09:14 AM, said:

 

I think we're accepting it. Congrats! You worked really hard.

 

post-24673-0-99850800-1529941420.jpg

 

Here is the new TI-99/4. This is an award from Tursi for the Highscore contest in april/may 2018

 

I am very happy and want to say - Thank you - for this lovely computer's piece.

 

HERE the complete gallery i published.

 

Really thanks Tursi.

Edited by ti99iuc
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This photo has me wondering... is it possible to make a TI-99/4A RAID ARRAY? (I know, I know, who would want or need to do that)... well this is a hobby it does not have to be practical! Imagine 4 TI's making a tower, with a counter top across each tower. Of course each P-Box better have the whisper fan modification, or the user would need aircraft grade ear protection for those eight fans! ;)

 

gallery_47609_2208_379109.jpg

 

Hey, if you have that many P-Boxes, might as well use 'em!

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This photo has me wondering... is it possible to make a TI-99/4A RAID ARRAY? (I know, I know, who would want or need to do that)... well this is a hobby it does not have to be practical! Imagine 4 TI's making a tower, with a counter top across each tower. Of course each P-Box better have the whisper fan modification, or the user would need aircraft grade ear protection for those eight fans! ;)

Musing because I'm putting off sleep... all things are technically possible. Just a question of effort! ;)

 

I'm not sure that a RAID based on TI Disk Controllers, at least, would have very much advantage. If you assumed simple striping (where a file is written across all disks at once), you sadly would not be able to recognize many gains with a stock-ish system (such as just re-writing the DSR). This is because the TI CPU is responsible both for seeking the head and reading out sectors in software. So you couldn't really parallelize it - during sector transfer the CPU is pretty close to max'd out (I did some experiments to see how much I could get away with at the same time, and the answer was "almost nothing", it came down to just a few instructions per loop.) So you'd have to seek one drive, read one sector, seek the next drive, read one sector, etc. Odds are that the extra time needed to seek multiple drives would actually make it slower than a single drive. (But, you could gain the increased storage capacity.)

 

Of course, you could add a microcontroller to each disk controller to manage the seeking and sector reads for you, and thus have the data ready to go when the CPU got to that drive. That would probably offer some advantage in performance. But it's pretty blue sky. ;)

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This photo has me wondering... is it possible to make a TI-99/4A RAID ARRAY? (I know, I know, who would want or need to do that)... well this is a hobby it does not have to be practical! Imagine 4 TI's making a tower, with a counter top across each tower. Of course each P-Box better have the whisper fan modification, or the user would need aircraft grade ear protection for those eight fans! ;)

 

 

 

Hey, if you have that many P-Boxes, might as well use 'em!

 

 

Musing because I'm putting off sleep... all things are technically possible. Just a question of effort! ;)

 

I'm not sure that a RAID based on TI Disk Controllers, at least, would have very much advantage. If you assumed simple striping (where a file is written across all disks at once), you sadly would not be able to recognize many gains with a stock-ish system (such as just re-writing the DSR). This is because the TI CPU is responsible both for seeking the head and reading out sectors in software. So you couldn't really parallelize it - during sector transfer the CPU is pretty close to max'd out (I did some experiments to see how much I could get away with at the same time, and the answer was "almost nothing", it came down to just a few instructions per loop.) So you'd have to seek one drive, read one sector, seek the next drive, read one sector, etc. Odds are that the extra time needed to seek multiple drives would actually make it slower than a single drive. (But, you could gain the increased storage capacity.)

 

Of course, you could add a microcontroller to each disk controller to manage the seeking and sector reads for you, and thus have the data ready to go when the CPU got to that drive. That would probably offer some advantage in performance. But it's pretty blue sky. ;)

.

.

oh yes, a "Raid Array" over the disk drives would be hard to do...

and there is no real practical gain, as you say, isn´t it ?

 

But we talked about "chaining PEBs via FlexInterface-Cards" before, IIRC.....

So you could get some more PEB-slots for more cards, and some more space for mounting more disk drives :)

 

Wouldn´t it be nice, if you "really" want to switch OFF your (i.e.) RAMdisk, your SCSI-subsystem, or your PCode ?

You just would have to power OFF one of your PEBs ? ;) Does that work ?

 

But this is restricted by the CRU addresses, right ? And by the interoperability of cards...

So what could be the maximum of cards / CRU addresses / "subsystems" by chaining PEBs ?

I think of the total maximum that makes any sense. And maybe former restrictions can be broken

yes, the fan(s), of course ;)

xXx

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So what could be the maximum of cards / CRU addresses / "subsystems" by chaining PEBs ?

For new hardware, you could invent new schemes, but for traditional cards each card needs to grab a dedicated CRU address at >1x00.. technically that imposes a limit of 16 cards maximum (0-F). That addressing is a convention for the system, not so much a physical or electrical restriction. There's actually a lot of unused CRU space. ;)

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  • 1 month later...

I've recently made some additions/revisions to my setup. Added some wall-mounted clear acrylic shelves and LED lighting (since my rack shelves are pretty tightly packed, they're pretty dark and cavernous without). Obviously, there's a whole lot else going on there, but the TI 99/4A is at the centre of it all (and is the only device directly connected to the PVM, rather than run through an elaborate RGB signal detection/selection/amplification solution).

 

5LGvJTy.jpg

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i dig your server/network racks you are using as part of your setup- those bad boys wont be going anywhere :)

 

Yeah, when you live in a downtown core condo, you work with vertical space. So a 42u rack is the order of the day.

 

But the 16u rack on my desk is also very helpful, in its allowing me to position my PVM directly over top of my TI 99/4A, while still giving me space to work with it.

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