urbite

It was conveyed to me that the GROMs were (relatively) inexpensive PMOS chips with a calculator heritage, and were used because of the low cost.

1. Galaga 2. Gyrus Both of which I have the real thing

Asmusr - Thanks for such a fabulous piece of work! Your persistence and coding acumen is truly humbling. I've been thinking about learning some javascript, and js99er would be the perfect example to study. Keep up the good work

This was one of the three Sofmachine games - Spotshot (Dragonflyer), Barrage, and Jumpy (Qmaze). Spotshot was done by Jim Dramis (aka Parsec partner, Munchman, Car Wars) and Barrage was done by Garth Dollahite (TI Invaders). I spent many captivating hours "testing" Spotshot and Barrange and giving feedback to Jim and Garth. And I've played them many times in the years since, and they're still captivating. Not long after TI exited the home computer, the Sofmachine principals (Jim, Garth, and myself) had to get real jobs. I ended up back at TI in Dallas. A year or so later Sofmachine licensed the games to DataBiotics, who changed the name of Spotshot and Jumpy. Jumpy was my game, which was hurriedly wrapped up to meet DataBiotics datadeadline. While we were developing our games for Sofmachine, I didn't have as much time to devote to Jumpy as Jim and Garth did because I was also writing development utilities and designing/building hardware prototypes (16K banked cartridge emulator). One of these days I hope to truly finish Jumpy and add in some of the features I'd originally planned. With the many excellent 99/4A programming tricks that have been developed since (many by members of this forum), Jumpy could be more capable now.

Did you open up the case an confirm that you have a genuine TL866CS? If yes, which ebay seller did you purchase from? Does anyone have suggestions on the best place to find a genuine TL866A/CS? I have lots of old 21V EPROMs, so need the old unit. I have a nice BP Microsystems EPROM programmer, but it's parallel port so I have to keep an older PC up to use it.

Fabrice - that is REALLY NICE work!

Not meaning to derail this thread, but... Interesting that you mentioned "...Would you want to create Parsec?..." on a University Board. Funny thing is, that - indirectly - the University Board played a big role in creating Parsec. During my first co-op/intern stint at TI Home Computer I borrowed a University Board and played with it (a lot!) after work. I cut my teeth on TMS9900 assembly language with the University Board, because at that time there was no 99/4A assembler package. Heck there wasn't even a 99/4A - only the 99/4. So the University Board was the only system I could take home and work on after a TI work day. After my first co-op term TI let me take it back to college with me. The result of that was a University board project that interfaced a PAIA 3 octave keyboard with two TMS9919 sound generators. When I returned to TI for a second co-op term the 99/4A was about to be released. While the Mini Memory was being developed we wanted users to be able to experiment with assembly language programming without needing a PEB. I remembered how much I liked the University Board line-by-line assembler, so we located the source code for it in TI and I ported it to the Mini-Memory. Shortly after we finished up with the Mini-Memory, TI management paired Jim Dramis and I together with the directive, "We want you to work together to make a space game". That was all of the direction we had. The experience gained, errors made, and hours spent, on the University board and LBL assembler were definitely a part - indirectly - of creating Parsec.