in8regs

So.. moved to Saipan, constantly approached for bribes, complained about it, the Saipan crooks take offense for being called out for being crooks, make death threats and go after his money claiming taxes. To top it off, one of the largest organized crime organizations in world, J.P. Morgan Chase, is involved in going after him.

Meh timeline, missing the ti-99/4a, influence of other systems, a driving force of the commodore 64, biggest market holder for awhile, while listing less noteworthy systems.. and also no ST? Make that a crap timeline.

The way to go is picking up an XL or XE and installing the AtariMax 32-in-1 OS upgrade. This gives you software compatibility with the entire range of Atari 8-bit machines, without the need for a 'translator' disk. Easy to install, easy to use, the price is right. And if you want to be able to run all the latest current releases, a memory upgrade isn't too hard to do either. You forgot to list your Atari cat in your tagline:) His name is Julius... that's his favorite place to hang out, on top of my collection. So that's the official name, the Atari Julius:)

The way to go is picking up an XL or XE and installing the AtariMax 32-in-1 OS upgrade. This gives you software compatibility with the entire range of Atari 8-bit machines, without the need for a 'translator' disk. Easy to install, easy to use, the price is right. And if you want to be able to run all the latest current releases, a memory upgrade isn't too hard to do either. You forgot to list your Atari cat in your tagline:)

Ah, OK, so if an 800 were upgraded to 64k+, that would get rid of the requirement issue for most games? I found this website: http://www.atarimuseum.com/faqs/HARD_FAQ.HTML that goes over memory upgrades past 48k for the original 800.

How about the 800xl vs 130xe? Are there older games incompatible with newer models?

Were there games that required a 1200xl, 800xl, 130xe, or xegs over the original 800 to run?

K, short on space, what's the cycles situation? With TI graphics being highly compressible, even simple compression like RLE would make a lot of room. If cycles are tight, since you're just short of fitting, compress/process just enough, x line/characters needed to fit everything without sacrificing characters.

Crap, I'm wrong, only variants with h&v scroll.

Maybe with some very smart usage of characters you can come a long way, even perhaps with smooth scolling? In this video you can see how to cheat with the trees: The remake looks pretty smooth. Here's the game on several platforms, some with 9918as:

TMS9918A can't do parallax you say:

Microcontrollers have timers, dac, adcs, room for memory expansion, etc. I was looking at cf7+, it's nice but what I'd want is SD, which lots of the other platforms have had done for them, interfaced via cart & floppy, like this: http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/MMC2IEC. I immediately thought of the expansion compartment of the speech adapter for where I'd put it, and would want an SD cartridge(or a cartridge tethered to the uc in the speech synth) as well. The mmc2iec hardware likely could be used as is, just needing the uc code rewritten to emulate ti's disk controller/disk instead of c64, then wire it to the needed pins. That's nice, but in my view, all the sd/cf/etc devices are over priced, wanting $45-150. I got curious, so I looked at microcontrollers and interfacing with sd, which there are many cheap solutions, relatively easy sd hookup, already worked out with howtos. I eventually spied TI's msp430, their new MSP430G2xx go for 0.25c per 1000, and single 430s go for as little as $1.25 at places like mouser, even better, many versions are available as free samples from TI. SD and the 430's require a lot less soldering and space than the FPGA setup the cf7+ uses. Did I forget to mention? The 430 is essentially the microcontroller version of the 9900:) Albeit modified, not compatible. Though a microchip or pic uc might be a better fit, the idea of the 430 being used for interfacing to the 4a is appealing:) Anyway, I even saw a PIC uc comparable to the low end 430's used to playback raw audio at 8bit 8khz off of an interfaced sd. Using a uc could be viewed as cheating/not as hard core, I suppose:) Though I believe there was an external DAC add-on back in the day. A compromise to roll your own are the $20 development boards, like starting with the mmc2iec, but need to add the sd interface.

> EKGs Actually.. http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/litabsmultiplefilelist.tsp?literatureNumber=slaa280a The 430 ucs having evolved from the 9900.

The problem with whtech is they require prepending http:// to an ftp url, which is.. unexpected. digisynt.dsk isn't in the subdirectory anymore, and whtech's search and a google site search come up with no results for it. There's still reconstructing it from peekbot if need be. What's the highest precision timer available?

Hey, so there's enough oomf to do sound affects, not just title screens, after all: http://99er.net/rev4.html. You've discussed this before:) http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ti99-4a/message/61153 ftp.whtech.com is dead, but peekbot lets you look at the files as hex and text: http://peekbot.jamtronix.com/dispatch.fcgi/catalog_image/ftp%3A%2F%2Fftp.whtech.com%2Femulators%2Fpc99%2Futils%2Fdigisynt.dsk