retroclouds

Some more pics:

I have a bunch of original TI casette tapes that I never used, got those at one of the german TI-trefs about a decade ago. They are in good condition as you can see in the attached pictures. Some of them are still shrink wrapped. Can't tell if they are readable or not though. There is some basic teaching stuff and quite a few adventure games for the tunnels of doom cartridge. Also 2 copies of "Pennies and Prizes - Quest for the King" by texcomp. One cassette has a custom label "Mini writer v1.0 use with TI MINI MEMORY". Could be that a few cassettes have some custom contents, as they have "disable write protection" labels on them. Now here's the plan: I don't want to longer hord/keep these cassettes and don't feel going through the ebay route. Therefor I'd like to trade the 39 cassettes collection for a TI peripheral (PEB equipment card or something similar). If you are interested PM via Atariage. I prefer to ship to Europe. The "best" offer receives the whole collection, I won't split it up. Shipping costs will be worked out privately. Trade deadline is Saturday December 15th. I'll contact the best offer on Sunday December 16th. Included are: 5x Basic für Anfänger (shrink wrapped) 5x Basic für Anfänger (2 with custom content?) 1x Teach yourself extended basic 1x Oldies but goodies Spiele 1 (shrink wrapped) 2x Oldies but goodies Spiele 2 (shrink wrapped) 2x Oldies but goodies Spiele 2 2x Marketing plan spiel 1x Ihr Finanzberater (shrink wrapped) 5x Voodoo Castle 1x Savage Island series (shrink wrapped) 1x Savage Island series 2x Mission Impossible (1 with wrinkled label bottom) 1x Strange Odyssey 1x Mystery Fun House (custom cassette case) 1x Pirate Adventure 1x The Count 1x Pyramid of Doom 1x Adventureland 1x The Golden Voyage (crack in cassette case) 2x Pennies and Prizes - Quest for the King (custom cassette case), Distributed by Tex-Comp 1x Music Skills Trainer (custom cassette case) 1x Mini Write v1.0 (re-used TI-cassette, custom cassette case)

What about turning it into an electron application? https://electronjs.org/

Think I read somewhere that the F18A also supports a 30 rows/80 character mode as opposed to the "normal" 24 x 80 columns mode. If that is true, can someone point me how the F18A VDP registers must be set to activate the mode? Thanks retroclouds *EDIT* It's 30 rows, not 31 rows.

So how this this compare to 4A DOS in terms of functionality ?

Never heard of Command DOS before. What does it allow you to do on the TI-99/4A ?

Here's the first version of my device scan program. It's an 8K ROM and runs completely in scratchpad ram, so no 32K expansion required. DSRSCANC.BIN It can currently identify the following devices: Real devices: TIPI Sidecar TI Disk Controller card TI Disk Controller sidecar TI RS232/PIO card TI RS-232 interface sidecar PGRAM+ card MYARC RS232 Interface card model RSIC-1 nanopeb SIO CF7+ Emulation: Classic99 Controller (Disk/Clipboard/Clock) JS99er Controller (Disk) Device identification is done based on a CRC-16 (Cyclic Redundancy Check) of the 1K block at >4000->43ff. The checksum of that block of memory is shown in the column CRC2. Note that I also do a CRC-16 check on the 8K block at >4000->5fff, (column CRC1) but it's currently not used for device indentification. I would like to add the checksums for more devices to this program. So if you're willing to help. Please add the checksums (value in column CRC1 and CRC2) to this thread, telling what device it belongs to. I can then add the appropriate identification strings to the program. Note that Device identification currently is purely based on CRC-16, so for devices that do not have a DSR (e.g. SAMS) or have a self-modifying DSR (HRD ramdisk) are not properly recognized at this time. Oh and as always, use at your own risk.

Now that my daily driver TI-99/4a console is working again I've added some more devices to the scan (previous post updated). * TI Disk Controller sidecar * TI RS-232 interface sidecar

This week my daily driver TI-99/4a console (that's the one with an F18a) broke down. I thought the easiest thing to do was to just swap the mainboard and keep on going for now (I have plenty of spare consoles). Oh boy, was I wrong. The tricky part was to transplant the F18a. I took out the F18a and you guessed it, I managed to break a pin connecting to the VDP socket. Felt like an idiot there. Luckily I was able to solder on another pin to the F18a board, so got the F18a working fine again (took me several hours and multiple attempts putting on that pin. I'm not a hardware guy so was pretty proud of myself doing the soldering without damaging the F18a board) . Anyway, what I noticed after putting everything back together is that when I typed on the keyboard, there was a very fast repeating of the keys while typing. Tried to type "call clear" and got "caaaalllll cleeeaaar" So I thought something was wrong with my replacement mainboard and swapped it again, this time being absolutely sure to be as careful as possible not to damage the F18a. I put the keyboard back on, and got the same behaviour. So this time I swapped the keyboard as well and now everything works as expected. Now here to my question, is there any real logic in the keyboard? I was under the assumption that it's just a matrix you poll. What would explain the above behaviour? At first I thought there could be something wrong with the clock, voltage being slightly of or whatever on the mainboard. But it did not occur to me the keyboard itself could be the culprit. The keyboard in error has the manufacturer "HI-TEK", the one that's working has no manufacturer at all, presume it's made by Texas Instruments (did they even do that?). Anway, long story short. My TI-99/4a is working again and I'm a happy camper. Never thought I'd have such an issue because of malfunctioning keyboard. retroclouds

Bummer is that my daily driver TI-99/4a console (the only one with an F18a) started having some issues this evening. The keyboard is no longer responding. This happened after I used one of my CF7+ devices. Dunno, always had a strange feeling as far this TI-99/4a console is concerned playing together with the CF7+ Always had the feeling that the keyboard keys repeated too quickly while using the CF7+ I'm not sure if this really is a keyboard thing or if there's something else wrong (9901 issue?) So further development will have to way for a while until I fixed the console. Do have sufficient replacement parts/consoles. The only thing I don't want to do is transplant my F18a to another console. Will see how it goes.

Thanks for the heads up. Actually my CRC check works real well for those cards that do have a DSR on ROM/EPROM. There are 2 cards I cannot identify via CRC, first being my HRD ramdisk and the other one is SAMS. The HRD has its DSR in RAM and it seems to overwrite parts of it quite often. Probably config settings. So no use doing checksums here. The SAMS does not have a DSR, so hence can't CRC it. I think that the SAMS is always at cru >1e00 so that should be good enough to identify it.

So far I was able to successfully identify the following devices by doing a CRC-16 check on the DSR space: Real devices: TIPI Sidecar TI Disk Controller card TI Disk Controller sidecar TI RS232/PIO card TI RS-232 interface sidecar PGRAM+ card MYARC RS232 Interface card model RSIC-1 nanopeb SIO CF7+ Emulation: Classic99 Controller (Disk/Clipboard/Clock) JS99er Controller (Disk) Still on my todo list (devices I own): RS232-PIO Single-Step (TI Workshop) CF7+ (in different flavours) nanopeb SIO Sidecar Disk Controller Sidecar RS232 Basically I have 2 ways of doing the CRC-16 check: CRC-16 check on >4000->5fff CRC-16 check on >4000->43ff To get a faster response I'm concentrating on the 2nd one. Not sure where this is all is leading to, probably add it as a function to my spectra2 library. But hey, it's about fun and learning stuff, so... Will probably release my "scanner" as a cartridge image by the end of next week. That way, results can be cross-checked / verified. Coming to think about it, would be cool to compile an online checksum list of the different DSR's flying around there.

I like it!

ok, here's the idea. I've implemented a CRC-16 check in assembly language. I think that it should be possible to identify most of the DSR rom's by their checksum. What I'd like to do is collect a list of checksums for the most common devices. Obviously you'd need to do more checking to identify the full characteristics of the device, e.g. to find out how much RAM a HRD has, etc. Will see how it goes.

Would say so too, turn off the switch or remove the HRD and try again. Had the same behaviour while I was experiencing issues with my HRD 3000.

Wish you all lots of fun! Nice seeing the pictures of the TI gear setup and you folks! :-)

Do we have sample code showing how to do a device CRU scan. What I would like to accomplish is scan and identify peripheral expansion cards like HRD3000, RS232, SAMS, ... Basically something like we have in the CFG834 configuration program.

It is something I'm seriously thinking about and last week I started doing some first design work. Keeping my fingers crossed, I don't have a track programming record lately

Thanks for moving, I was in the "wrong" subforum and noticed it too late.

ok, here is what I have in mind for a 21st century text progs' editor on the TI-99/4a: * Support for SAMs * f18a support (80x24, 80x30) * split-screen support, panes (e.g. editing/viewing 2 files at once) * open-file dialog with possibility to select file from list * command-line option for running #EA5 directly from inside the editor * cartridge based * config options

Thanks!

Can anyone point me to the latest version of DM 1000 ? Back in the day I was using v3.8 but I'm not certain it can handle my HRD 3000 properly. Seems to have issues with bigger disk drive size. Also is the source code for DM 1000 available ? Would like to assemble my own version if possible (just for fun) Thanks Filip

What is your favorite text editor on the TI-99/4a and what features does make it stand out the most? Also what feature would one appreciate most in 2018 ? For me it would be 80 columns and SAMS

Looking forward seeing what you come up with :-)

The card is working fine now. I replaced CR4 and CR5, that alone did not do the trick. Same behaviour as before. I checked CR9 with the multimeter again and it was acting strange. I desoldered it, tested it isolated with the multimeter and it appeared fine. As I did not have replacement 1N914 diodes, I soldered the same 1N914 back on the board again, and now the card is working. Still going to get some replacement 1N914's though. Quite happy that it is working now, took me quite some effort, but that's part of the fun.