Lord Vorkosigan Posted April 18, 2017 Share Posted April 18, 2017 What an attractive title, isn’t it? J First a little introduction: My first computer in the eighties was a TI99/4A, and I spent hours on it trying to push it to his limits. Unfortunately, I only had an Extended Basic cartridge, so I never had the opportunity to try assembler, so I didn’t had any chance to compete with my friends with Commodore 64… Few years later, I sold my TI99 and get an Atari ST, but I never forget this little box. I recently discovered that there is a strong TI99 community, and I’m really (really!) impressed by what your guys are still doing with the TI99. I knew my TI99 could compete with C64, and you are proving it! But now, there’s a chance to show that TI99 is BETTER than C64, as it could run Unix! OK, I don’t have any TI99 to play with, and I don’t even get free time to do anything around it, but I wanted to share with you some information about Fuzix, as I’m sure some serious geeks on this forum could be interested into porting Fuzix to the TI. So, Fuzix is a new project started by Alan Cox, one of the main contributor to the Linux Kernel. His aim was to do something small (small is beautiful) , and he started to port a System 5 Unix to Z80. Many forks was done to the project, and now Fuzix is running on Z80, Z180, 6809, 6502, 68000 processors. The TMS9900 being a real 16 bit processor, why not Fuzix on TI99 or Geneva? What is needed to get it is : - An open source ANSI C compiler. With GCC for the TMS9900, it’s seems we have one… - A timer interrupt with reasonable precision or a RTC - At least 32 Ko RAM, or banked RAM (SAMS?) - Lot’s of time... Some links: Alan Cox announcement: https://plus.google.com/+AlanCoxLinux/posts/a2jAP7Pz1gj The main project on GitHub : https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX More information in the Wiki: https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX Fuzix ported on a Tandy Coco2 : https://sites.google.com/site/cocoboot2/fuzix Video of Fuzix on a MSX2 TurboR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUIl--jNN2o So, anyone interested by this challenge? J 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickyDean Posted April 18, 2017 Share Posted April 18, 2017 There are several TI99 emulator solutions that you can play with. JS99er.com, Classic99, PC99, V9T9 - dos version and Java version, Mess\Mame. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+arcadeshopper Posted April 18, 2017 Share Posted April 18, 2017 Sounds cool Sent from my LG-H830 using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stuart Posted April 18, 2017 Share Posted April 18, 2017 Not sure if you've found it or not, and might be of interest - there are ports of LSX Unix and V6 Unix running on the TMS9995-based Mini-Cortex (http://www.stuartconner.me.uk/mini_cortex/mini_cortex.htm). Requires a little more hardware than the TI-99 provides unfortunately. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted April 18, 2017 Share Posted April 18, 2017 (edited) The 9900 is based on a TI 990 mini-computer CPU. I think there is already a Unix for it.*edit*Stuart beat me to it. Edited April 18, 2017 by JamesD 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mizapf Posted April 20, 2017 Share Posted April 20, 2017 Yes, but the mini-computer architecture was stripped down for the 9900, most painfully, dropping the supervisor mode (kernel mode). The 99000 series is the better successor of the original mini-computer. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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