Stupid blunders with my TI

[cbmeeks]

I thought I would start a thread on mistakes I've made over the years with my TI-99/4A.

 

Feel free to join in!

 

1983-ish (~10 years old)

I spent HOURS and HOURS typing out some BASIC program from a magazine listing. I then saved that program to cassette. The next day or so, I wanted to add to the program I had saved earlier. Perhaps I didn't finish it previously. So I rewind the tape to where I saved the program. Then, I typed out the ADDITIONAL lines of BASIC and saved it! I guess my 10 year old brain thought the computer would merge the code with the previous. When I later loaded the program, I found that only my additions were there. LOL

 

If I had just loaded the program first, I probably would have been OK.

 

 

2017 (GROWN MAN!!)

 

I get my shiny, new 32K RAM sidecar and plug 9V into it. I actually dabble in electrical engineering and even design and made my own 6502 SBC. So you would think I would have enough common sense to notice the card did not have a voltage regulator....and have enough common sense to double-check the PSU I was using....but I didn't. I plugged 9V into it thinking it was a 5V supply. Fried my SRAM chip. Thing got hot enough to cook bacon. LOL Once I realized my mistake, I was able to fix it. But I still feel stupid. BTW, I've done the exact same thing a couple more times with non-TI equipment. When will I learn?

 

 

 

Hey, I can at least say I wasn't as careless as Randy in school. Who, when 9-10 years old, wondered what would happen if he put a paperclip into an electrical outlet. LOL

 

 

[sparkdrummer]

I must admit I did the paper clip test as a kid. It was a shocking experience. I also tried putting slot car motor wires in. The motor didnt like it much and let the smoke leak.

[+Ksarul]

My first electrical adventures were made as a toddler. I was about 18 months old at the time. I snagged my mom's key ring (it had a nice fluffy bunny foot on it) and inserted a couple of keys into the slots in the nearest electrical outlet (apparently, the first one went into the neutral line). It knocked me for a loop and the bunny foot caught fire before the fuse for that circuit blew. . .melted the keys into the socket too. My mom was not too happy about what I did--but she was glad that I wasn't hurt.

[+OLD CS1]

Tweezers in wall socket at two. Circuit breakers are life savers.

[cbmeeks]

Ha! Those are awesome. I guess I was too scared of the outlet as a kid. My brother wasn't. I remember catching him run wires from a doorknob to the outlet. I guess he thought he would shock someone when they opened the door. He was 6-7 at the time. Fortunately, I stopped him before the wires made it into the outlet. lol

[senior_falcon]

Inexperience leads to making mistakes. Experience leads to making the same mistakes a second time.

[+Lee Stewart]

I had purchased a second E/A package (late 1980s) for backup. I hid that backup cartridge so that it was safe from wandering off in one of my kids’s hands, never to be seen again. Several years later, I remembered what I had done and went in search of said cartridge. I have not yet found it! I suppose it may surface one day, but I suspect I had hidden it in a piece of furniture that left the premises long ago.

 

...lee

[+chue]

As a 13 year old I took apart my TI because I wanted to see how it worked on the inside. I got it apart and thought I could make it go faster (don't remember how exactly). Anyway unbeknownst to me I ended up killing the power supply. I tried turning it on but the LED did not come on, and obviously neither did the TI.

 

I was at Radio Shack some time later and noticed they were selling some kind of board that output the exact same voltages as the TI power supply. I didn't know this at the time, but I believe these were the QI power supplies that TI had sold to Radio Shack. I purchased the board and stuck it in the TI and it came back to life. I was super excited about my fix, and my hubris caused me to do some other things with the TI that killed it for good.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

Biggest blunder that I can recall: plugging my first Geneve into a test bench backplane that had been removed from a PEB. The backplane did not have the orientation marked so I ended up inserting the card backwards. Powering it up resulted in blown traces and components and many, many, many hours of repair work. I am happy to report, Senior_Falcon, that I have not repeated this particular mistake.

[JB]

Turning the PBox off midway through a Tunnels of Doom session because it was loud and I didn't need the disk drive while playing.

I was young and completely unaware of how computers work.

[digdugnate]

Fork in a 220 socket in the laundry room when i was like 6 or 7. blew me back a good bit, according to my dad.

 

he said 'well, i guess nate's never doing that again!'

[+FarmerPotato]

Operating a Myarc WDS-100 drive enclosure without the top case, because the drive starter coil was failing and required manual intervention to start the drive.

 

Wrapped my fingers around the power supply AC input socket, which had exposed conductors.

[Omega-TI]

Not knowing, assuming, so not even trying. Now that I know, I decided to give myself a reminder...

[Tursi]

I have a simple one... as a kid I spent six hours or so typing in a BASIC game on my cassette only system. When debugging got frustrating, I slapped the keyboard. Ghosting caused a QUIT. Don't hit your TI.

 

A later one - I had my audio out hooked up to a really old Heathkit tube-based scope with no screws in the case, and I was just watching the musical waveforms for fun. I shifted the scope and something inside shorted against the case and zapped back into the TI, killing it. I thought it was fried, but it power cycled fine, except that the audio output was toasted. No audio at all, but as it warmed up, SOME audio would start to come through. Ran that way for many more years!

[HOME AUTOMATION]

In a like vein... I connected the audio out from my TI to a stereo amplifier(aux)... some weeks later I connected my new color TV(another street fix) to the same amp(tape in)... at some point in the future I happened to switch the input selector while the TV was on... I was probably switching from TI sound to MTV... zap no more TI audio! Troubleshooting revealed that the selector switches were mechanically coupled with poor alignment resulting in a make before break on some contacts... the TV had a hot B+ chassis(nearly 200vdc). This at once derailed my efforts.

there are many morals to this story...like...

Don't put all your inputs in one basket!

[Opry99er]

Sooooo many....

 

Mostly not backing up stuff...

 

1) In 2011 I lost over 50 hours of TI code in a RAMDisk battery loss because I didn't back it up.

 

2) I lost over 3 months of work on 2 different game projects when my PC hard drive crashed in 2015... no back up.

 

3) I had a ton of BASIC graphics saved on a MiniMem cartridge that my buddy Mark and I made--passing the cartridge back and forth between the two of us and working on them on our TIs. We had the whole 4K filled with BASIC graphics for my RPG. A couple years and a few inter-state moves later, I fired up the TI in order to back up the graphics... eager to see them again. ***Full memory loss, dead battery.

 

 

I should have learned after the RAMDisk... but I didn't.

[+OLD CS1]

I have a simple one... as a kid I spent six hours or so typing in a BASIC game on my cassette only system. When debugging got frustrating, I slapped the keyboard. Ghosting caused a QUIT. Don't hit your TI.

 

I did this exact thing when I was about 11 or 12. Only I was working with a borrowed Extended BASIC cartridge. As fast as my temper has always been I seem to be able to think rationally more quickly or at least in parallel: as I raised my fist I decided I would not hit the keyboard since the keys would likely break and scatter everywhere, so I hit the top of the computer instead. Which jogged the cartridge loose. Which crashed the computer. Which lost several hours of work because saving to tape takes FOR-EV-ER.

 

Truth told, this is largely why I stopped working on the TI in my youth. My short temper and ease of frustration versus my lack of modern accoutrements for the TI. All my friends with their Apples, Ataris, and Commodores could do things much more quickly and easily than I could on my TI. Generally if things take too long I get distracted by another project and away I go. To my story, I am pretty certain I never finished that program and moved on to something else.

 

I was lured away from the TI by the Apple ][+ in my gifted class, the Atari 1200 in the computer lab, and my buddy's Commodore 64.

[majestyx]

 

I did this exact thing when I was about 11 or 12. Only I was working with a borrowed Extended BASIC cartridge. As fast as my temper has always been I seem to be able to think rationally more quickly or at least in parallel: as I raised my fist I decided I would not hit the keyboard since the keys would likely break and scatter everywhere, so I hit the top of the computer instead. Which jogged the cartridge loose. Which crashed the computer. Which lost several hours of work because saving to tape takes FOR-EV-ER.

 

Truth told, this is largely why I stopped working on the TI in my youth. My short temper and ease of frustration versus my lack of modern accoutrements for the TI. All my friends with their Apples, Ataris, and Commodores could do things much more quickly and easily than I could on my TI. Generally if things take too long I get distracted by another project and away I go. To my story, I am pretty certain I never finished that program and moved on to something else.

 

I was lured away from the TI by the Apple ][+ in my gifted class, the Atari 1200 in the computer lab, and my buddy's Commodore 64.

 

Your and Tursi's stories are familiar. I would get frustrated at some of the games I'd play on the TI (I think Alpiner was one that always got to me with those completely random boulders falling) and get so mad that I'd hammer fist the "coffee warmer" section of the TI which would almost always reset it and sometimes make it whine with the long beep until I'd turn it off. Stupid kid getting too frustrated over something that was supposed to be fun - oh to go back knowing what we know now.

 

Also, money was always tight, and since most of my tapes were used for recording songs off the radio, I'd be stingy with my TI tapes. Of course, due to overuse, my typed-in listings from Compute, 99er, a few books, and even some of my own programs ended up with dropouts on the tape. It certainly helped to improve my typing skills, but also made me realize I needed to upgrade to a new machine, much like OLD CS1 states. The Apple //c was the one I got since my high school had Apple ]['s and (imagine that) Franklin Ace Apple ][ clones, with a lot of software available for it. My cousins had C64 and Atari 800 so the TI was looking pretty shabby by 1985 with it being an orphan, Triton catalogs notwithstanding.

 

As for non-TI buffoonery - as a child of around 5 or 6, I accidentally knocked the power cord of a wall clock out of the socket. It bent the prongs so, not knowing how it worked, I decided to hold the prongs while plugging it in. I kept wondering why my teeth and back kept hurting everytime I tried this... until my mom heard my wailing - which I wasn't all that aware of doing - and screamed at me to drop the cord. My first lesson with the dangers of electricity!

Edited January 23, 2019 by majestyx

[FDOS]

Even though my time with the TI-99/4A began Christmas day 1982, it was a fortunate choice for me, as I was travelling internationally quite frequently out of Sacramento, but expected to relocate to Chicago, as the new International Marketing Manager, Electronics Division, of the entire corporation I was working for, but also travelling to Dallas where I was required to interface with the engineering department, as I was gathering requirements for the primary product line they were introducing to telecom companies around the world. Obviously, I was selected for this job due to my expertise in telecommunications and the specific product line.

 

The primary engineer on this project was also a TI-99/4A hobbyist, so due to the frequency of my visits, and soon separation from wife and family we became good friends, and he took me to the local TI-99/4A user group meetings where we discovered that TI had released the unfinished TI Forth to the user groups, Fig forth was the user interface language of the system we were modifying for the different countries. He had a complete TI PEB system at his home in Bedford, Texas, which was close to the user group that we both belonged to now. Therefore, I didn't make any of the common mistakes with the TI-99/4A until after the 21st century was well underway, and I was in my early 70's. When I broke something on a TI PEB card, I managed my frustration by doing the same thing to all the similar cards (3 x WHT SCSI, etc.), and fixing them one at a time takes hours, over days and sometimes weeks to complete; what shouldn't take more than 15 minutes.

 

We need some more hardware repair members like we use to have BITD.

 

Bill

[senior_falcon]

The worst for me happened after I added sprites and display at to the compiler. My hard disk was over 90% full and so I decided to delete some files to make more room. Guess which one I deleted - you guessed it, the only copy of the source code. All efforts at recovery proved futile, so I wound up disassembling it with a disassembler I wrote many years ago. After much effort I was able to add the new code to the older compiler code and get it so it produced exactly the same code. Unfortunately the comments were lost, which makes it hard when I have to go back and figure out what is happening.

[+TheBF]

I heard about TI-Forth in one of the magazines that were published in 1980s.

With no internet I then had to find a supplier of TI stuff in Canada in one of the smaller cities here.

 

As luck would have it I found a guy trying to make some money selling TI stuff and he had a copy of TI-Forth.

I called him and drove to the location and got the disks and manual and hurried home to try it.

 

I put in the disks and started the system. "Hey it has an editor, how do I run it... there we go." And I promptly edited the boot sector on the floppy disk.

 

Had to drive back and get another copy.

 

RTFM carefully.

[+FarmerPotato]

I heard about TI-Forth in one of the magazines that were published in 1980s.

With no internet I then had to find a supplier of TI stuff in Canada in one of the smaller cities here.

 

As luck would have it I found a guy trying to make some money selling TI stuff and he had a copy of TI-Forth.

I called him and drove to the location and got the disks and manual and hurried home to try it.

 

I put in the disks and started the system. "Hey it has an editor, how do I run it... there we go." And I promptly edited the boot sector on the floppy disk.

 

Had to drive back and get another copy.

 

RTFM carefully.

 

My FORTH story:

 

the TI FORTH package , disks and manual, was dropped off by a TI employee who said "you have to see this demo". What is this!??! How does it work?

 

My older brother and I followed the getting started instructions in the manual. It became clear that we needed a user floppy disk. We had only one disk candidate: my new program save disk, purchased for the enormous sum of $1.99 at JC Penney, on which I had saved working copies of an all new, large sprites version of TI-TREK. I think we owned like 8 floppy disks in total. Even the disk drive was on loan from TI to our boy scout troop (TI made it a gift eventually.)

 

My brother insisted it would be fine if we used my disk. I was not so sure. In the end, I gave him the disk. TI FORTH ate it. The files were gone and there were Klingon CALL CHARs on the user screens.

 

I was sad. I never worked on another TREK game. But we moved on to programming bitmap mode in FORTH. Yay.

Edited March 28, 2019 by FarmerPotato

[+adamantyr]

Ah yes, stupid blunders...

 

So around 1986 I think, I got a copy of Extended BASIC. I was 11 years old and I wanted to type in those neat games from the big 99'er book among others and see them go.

 

But for some reason, any program with sprites tended to fail. I would get the error SUBPROGRAM NOT FOUND IN # over and over. It seemed to a problem with the COINC subprogram. Frustrated and angry I complained to my brother, my parents, etc. that obviously this stupid cartridge was broken. I figured games like Wizard's Lair must have worked because they didn't use the subprogram at all.

 

So a year or so later, I convince them to let me order Triton's Super Extended BASIC from the catalog. Surely the bug would be fixed there! But no, same errors again... So now I was convinced something must be wrong with the console itself. It was rejecting the command, that was the ONLY explanation.

 

Then one day, my good friend (who also had a TI) called me up and asked. "Hey... that one command that doesn't work. How are you spelling it?"

 

I look. CONIC. I look at the manual. COINC. Crap.

 

I'll say this for my younger self... I did own up to my mistake and tell my parents what happened. (They laughed their asses off.) Of course then after that, anytime I had programming issues the first question they'd ask is "Are you sure you're spelling everything correctly?"

[jrhodes]

Trying LOAD"CS1" from basic, the day i first got my TI...

I was use to the C64 style of loading programs. They guy i bought from said to load anything on the TI i would have to load it from the cassette port, "or cs1 as this computer calls it" (to put it as he said it).

I only got the computer, cassette cable+tape player, and a speech synth from the seller (along with a tape in the player, which turned out to be blank). It was not until i called the seller back and explained what i had tried that he informed me of the proper way, using the OLD command, which still did not work as there was nothing on the tape to be loaded.

By the end of my first day of owning the TI though, i had finally wrote to and loaded from CS1.

The TI is the only machine i have encountered a OLD command on.

Edited March 29, 2019 by jrhodes

[HOME AUTOMATION]

I'll bet Microsft made "OLD" up.

 

Their finger prints are to be found inside the TI's BASIC.