Something cool

[Opry99er]

Friends...

 

I have spend the last couple of hours falling back in love with my program recorder and all my tapes. Many I had never tried to load, and several I had tried previously but could never get the programs to load properly with a "DATA OK".

 

Tonight I decided to give some of these old tapes a try... maybe get something out of them. I was greeted with some amazing results.

 

 

I had 3 tapes I wanted to try out tonight, but only got to one of them... It had 5 games on it which were fun and it was a blast breaking down the code and learning how these programmers thought.

 

 

 

Each time a game successfully loaded, I immediately saved it to a fresh tape. (This old tape required alot of tone and volume adjusting, and the sound was fairly weak coming into the TI... I am glad I was able to get all these games done, even though one or two took several tries)

 

 

 

 

The first game I tried out was a game called MasterMind... this is a tricky little game, not unlike one of the mini games on the Price is Right, though I cannot remember which one it was. Something to do with guessing the order the digits in the price of a car (or something like that).

 

Anyway.... Mastermind

 

 

You have to plug colors into each floor of this building... they are either in the correct order or they are not. You get clues, but you have to rearrange the colors without getting too many wrong guesses. Very interesting game and alot of fun.

 

 

The second game was a classic "flip the cards" memory game with a little TI twist. Two player game only, but I played as myself and as a phantom player named BOB. It was a fun game, and reminded me of playing these memory games as a kid.

 

Matchup

 

 

 

 

 

The third game I found was a really interesting game called Crazy Line... It is similar to the classic worm games, but with a funny side effect of being ONLY a two player game and you MUST play with joysticks. Really cool... just not so much by myself at 1:00 AM.

 

Crazy Line

 

 

 

The fourth game was one called "Squares"... I actually didn't play this one because it is a TI BASIC game and it uses the higher character sets (I was doing all this in XB), so I sort of just re-saved it to a new fresh tape and moved on...

 

Squares Title Screen

 

 

 

The last game was REALLY well done... it is called "Sinking Ships" and it is almost like a battleship game that is designed to improve Battleship strategy by forcing you to select strategic locations on the map in order to maximize your moves. You always win, but the goal is to sink all enemy ships in the fewest moves possible. Love this game and look forward to playing it more.

 

Sinking Ships

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, tonight was a joyous night for me. No PEB plugged up, no Classic99... Just a cassette player, my TI, a box of old tapes, and a pencil. As soon as I can get my serial interface up and running, I will upload these games to this thread so that you guys can all play them. Maybe next week I will get to another tape or two. For now, I have 4 (maybe 5) new games to play and enjoy.

 

[ti99iuc]

Very Nice me too have loaded lot of mines tapes but using the HxC SD and when the program succesfully loaded i saved in the SD card so i have a digital copy of it to share here and on my website

because is digital format i also liked to scan docs and cassette tape so to have an immortal format image of the original

 

funny time for me so i can understand yours

[sparkdrummer]

I dig cassettes too. Still got quite a few and load one up fairly often.

[sometimes99er]

Thanks. Very nice.

 

 

[Opry99er]

Very Nice me too have loaded lot of mines tapes but using the HxC SD and when the program succesfully loaded i saved in the SD card so i have a digital copy of it to share here and on my website

because is digital format i also liked to scan docs and cassette tape so to have an immortal format image of the original

 

funny time for me so i can understand yours

Yes Ciro.. It was alot of fun.

 

These tapes are IUG User software tapes, so these games and utility programs (which are on the other cassette) may very well be unique. Then again, maybe not.

 

There are no docs, unfortunately, or I would certainly scan them.

Edited November 27, 2015 by Opry99er

[+Ksarul]

As a general note, the old IUG programs were also preserved in the form of the Amnion Library from Guy-Stefan Romano. He was the IUG librarian and kept it alive long after the IUG folded. I have about 80% of the library as original disks I purchased from him before he passed away. The Kaiserslautern K-Town 99ers were in the process of buying the whole library as time and funds allowed, but we were never able to complete the project, unfortunately.

[ti99iuc]

Yes i know about 99/4 user group, me too have some of them tapes.

 

 

it is all in my "to do list" ... just i have hundreds of differents cassette tapes to convert so the work is slowly

 

 

Edited:

 

It could be nice to re-create all the library Jim !!

 

soon another list for Ralf !

Edited November 27, 2015 by ti99iuc

[Opry99er]

Wow, that is a very nice collection, ciro!!!

 

I am jealous of your tape collection.

 

 

@Jim, that is a very cool bit of information.... I would like to see the entire library dumped... Maybe between you, Ciro and me, we could get close?

[Opry99er]

So I spent some time tonight loading and transferring programs.

 

There are two zips here... A zip of Utilities and a zip of Games. The games are the ones listed above plus a few more. The utilities are mostly mortgage payment, loan payment, amortization scheduling, etc.

 

The game I enjoyed the most was "Mouse In A Maze".... Really well done little game.

 

 

Anyway, don't know if these games have seen the light of day in a while, but please try them out and enjoy them. I had high hopes for "TI ALIENS" but it disappointed. It is, however, a console BASIC arcade game. It was written in 1981, according to the code.

 

 

Anyway, please enjoy.

 

 

 

Utils.zip

Games.zip

[sometimes99er]

So I spent some time tonight loading and transferring programs.

 

There are two zips here... A zip of Utilities and a zip of Games. The games are the ones listed above plus a few more. The utilities are mostly mortgage payment, loan payment, amortization scheduling, etc.

 

Thanks. Just gave the games a rather quick spin - in CPU Overdrive.

 

The game I enjoyed the most was "Mouse In A Maze".... Really well done little game.

 

Well, yes and no. I guess this one seems to have most potentiel or is "slickest" of them all. Maybe a bit of Atari 2600 Adventure there. I guess I might have missed something, as I visited many rooms, but didn't find anything.

 

Anyway, don't know if these games have seen the light of day in a while, but please try them out and enjoy them.

 

Most are in the Gamebase.

 

I had high hopes for "TI ALIENS" but it disappointed. It is, however, a console BASIC arcade game. It was written in 1981, according to the code.

 

Yeah. One expects a space shooter or perhaps an RPG ?

 

The setup here, a 1976 Outlaw (1978 Space Invaders) clone, - you shoot at the invader and the invader shoots at you, has probably hundreds of similar versions in the Gamebase. Like your Riding For the Brand.

 

Now back to having fun making games. Well, mostly game elements ...

 

https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/1gam-how-to-succeed-at-making-one-game-a-month--gamedev-3695

 

 

Edited April 2, 2017 by sometimes99er

[PeBo]

I've always had a soft spot for Moonbean Software cassettes. They were often fun little XB games that made it easy to forget you were playing an XB game.

 

I still play Garbage Belly quite often (I especially like the platformer level - simple, but when coupled with the bomb's way level and the main screen, it makes for surprisingly diverse game play). I've never quite understood the point of the garbage cans though...it would have been a better game if you couldn't just move through them. I've always assumed that that was the original intent, and that the collision detection was removed for speed considerations.

 

Still a fun little time waster that is a couple notches above magazine type-in games.

[digdugnate]

i love this! thanks for sharing.

 

I have a NIB TI Program Recorder that I scored (in the sexy black color) that I have hooked up to my TI. My wife looked at me funny when I loaded up my Pirate's Adventure tape and turned up the sound for the first time because I started laughing at the nostalgia.

 

My tapes have held up surprisingly well considering how old some of them are!

[unhuman]

I think that Analogies tape is the one I sent you.