Paradroyd

I felt exactly the same way when I saw how obsessed people were over OLED screens on wifi modems. ESP8266 modules are like 3 to 6 dollars. Slap a DB25 and an OLED on it and people will pay $50+.

I got mine upgraded to 1.0betav018 tonight without a problem. Before I started, I shut down the Pi and took an image of the SD card with Image for Windows, just so I'd have a failsafe way to back out if needed. Then I brought the Pi back up, sshed into it from putty on another machine and started htop in the putty window. Then I got into TI BASIC, called TIPI and started the upgrade. I was able to watch the CPU usage and see the processes launch and finish. It took a while, but it was pretty easy to see when the upgrade was done. The CPU on the Pi Zero W was hovering around 100% until the upgrade was done, then it dropped to something like 10% and bounced around that. At that point I hit "R" to reload on the TI and I could see that it had upgraded. I'm sure things would look significantly different on something like a Pi 3 with multiple cores (The Zero W has one). but it should still be fairly obvious what the Pi's up to using htop or something similar. I didn't need to use the backup image, but it's good to have a good roll-back point. Now that I think of it, I'm going to do a post-upgrade image right now so that I have another restore point.

The VGA is mostly for people with Model 3s that don't have 80 columns natively. Honestly, it's not much use to me since the internal monitor can already do 80 columns. I typically don't keep it hooked up. It is nice to know that if I ever have a problem with the internal monitor, I can re-route output to an external VGA though with a simple command. The FTP server is nice, especially since half of my systems are on another floor. It also has Dropbox support via the tcp/ip stack over Ethernet. It has a 9 pin joystick port too, though I haven't used that a whole lot yet. This model 4 has no floppies or floppy controller, so I kind of had to get an auto boot drive system of some sort to make it usable anyway. Expensive as it is, the M3SE solves a whole bunch of problems for me at once.

I initially looked at the FreHD but opted for the M3SE for my model 4 instead. A bit more expensive, but it does a lot more. In addition to hard drive emulation (2 CF card slots), it has separately addressable VGA out, Ethernet with it's own tcp/ip stack (including telnet and ftp clients and servers, network time, dhcp, the whole works. I have not been disappointed with it. I bought it directly from Bartlett labs.

The funny thing is, I know the Pi and Raspbian pretty well, but I'm comparatively a noob at the TI99/4A. I mean I've had mine for over 30 years, but The tape drive is about as sophisticated as I've gotten with it until fairly recently. In terms of Pis I have 11 or 12 of my own of various types and I just bought 30 more Pi 3B+ for a project at work. (We're using them as OPAC terminals and display kiosks). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a Tipi before they sold out so it looks like I'll have to wait a while before I join in on that fun. Looking forward to it, because my NanoPEB recently went squirrely, so I'm down to using my Flashrom99 and my 32K sidecar until I can get another NanoPEB or a Tipi.

Here are a few more. A few months later I added one of Ian Maverick's HiRes Graphyx boards. Here's the board installed with a few pics of it being used via TRS-Pic.

M3SE, actually. This model 4 doesn't even have the floppy controller or serial port. It was originally the very low-end 16K model that someone upgraded to 64K. I found it in a electronics shop near here with a $30 price tag on it. Needed a bit of cleanup, but other than that it was in great shape. Lots more pics of it (inside & out) here.

I'm using the ANSI capable telnet client bundled with the M3SE. The M3SE has an Ethernet interface and comes with a full TCP/IP stack. Not cheap, but more than worth it for me for what it does.

The Model 4 is great for modern telnet BBSing... Are there any telnet accessible BBSs out there that actually run on Z80-based TRS-80s these days?

That's really looking good!

Awesome! I will definitely buy one!

This is great news! Really looking forward to it!

So is there an actual link to buy these NanoPEBs somewhere?

I did basically the same thing on my speech synth to support the new sidecar 32K memory expansion.

I got TI99Sim 0.14.0 (currently the latest version) to compile from source on the PocketChip last night. It pretty much just worked...