Willsy

Indeed. However, since the cart contains 15K of GRAM, I think that's more than enough for what I was envisioning. I'd just use GRAM. The only other problem I see is... Classic99 doesn't emulate any of this stuff There's no way I could develop this on real iron. I'd rather nail my feet to the floor!

Absolutely. My parents got me one for Christmas 1984 (I think). I think it cost £79 from Dixons - an 800XL with the Atari data recorded. Loved it. Like you say, there was next to nothing available on the highstreet for it. In Shrewsbury, Shropshire, where I grew up, there was precisely *one* shop that stocked cassette software for the A8. It was called STD Communications on Wyle Cop in the town centre! It was mostly Mastertronic titles for £1.99 or £2.99. I bought Action Biker among other things from there!

Just subscribed to ANTIC on the basis of the reccomendations above. And I'm a TI-99/4A guy! But hey, if it's retro, it's all good!

I think it simply came down to price, nothing else. The computer boom in the UK hit at a point when the UK itself was in a deep deep depression. It was the age of strikes (electricity strikes, rail strikes, TV strikes, British Leyland strikes), 3 million unemployed, the miners strike, and the Falklands war. Price was simply everything. The Atari machines were ten times the machine of the likes of the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, but it was frankly irrelevant. Price won. There was no way that a machine costing what the Atari's did was going to get a foothold on the market in 1981/82. Britain was broke. My parents bought me a Spectrum in 1983 from a Kays catalogue. They paid it off weekly. That was the only way they could do it.

If you feel like implementing it, TF uses 16-bit (i.e. 4-digit) hex numbers seperated by a space.

So one could write to grom/gram at (more or less) normal speeds?

Indoor Soccer. Utter utter garbage. I'd like to meet the person that wrote that and kick them squarely in the plums. Actually it's the TI marketing department that should take a kick in the dangle berries. What were they thinking?

With regard to COINCALL if you have sprites off the screen that are on top of one another or transparent sprites on top of one another then you may get a hit if they have non-empty characters associated with them.

You get a surprising amount of work done on the VDP interrupt. My machine code version of manic miner (un-finished) runs entirely off of the VDP interrupt. The main thread is just a JMP $ instruction! I do it by splitting up the work across multiple frames. Frame 0 - updates sprite positions, frame 1, animate floors, frame 2, animate oxygen level bar etc. The nature of that game means 60 fps are simply not required!

I was thinking of a software interface that would allow the TI to write to flash pages. At it's lowest level I guess it would work in a similar way to accessing the VDP: An address port and a data read and write port. Addition ports would be needed to set the flash page. In practice, you'd have to steal a few addresses from (probably) the end of the cart space. The microcontroller software would monitor for accesses in those areas and behave accordingly. Would (obviously) require additional software on the microcontroller side though. I was thinking about things like a RAM disk for Forth, where the blocks themselves are hosted in flash on the chip, rather than on disk. No DSR would be needed, since a Forth block is 1024 contiguous bytes of memory. It would therefore be very easy to write them/read them to/from flash, as long as an interface existed to permit it. Sounds like it's not possible currently.

Thanks for the explanation. I must admit I haven't followed the UberGROM stuff at all, as my hobby time is quite limited and I've really had to be strict with myself. I've really been engrossed in Forth/TurboForth much too much! So, the 512K of ROM space (and the GROM space, for that matter) is hosted in Flash memory, yes? Is it possible (via some contrived means) for the TI to write to flash pages somehow? (I'm thinking out cool options for storage of data in the flash memory, in addition to cartridge images).

Can these carts host bank switching carts? I guess so, since XB is a bank switching cart, right?

Post your code. Let's have a look and we'll get out sleuthing heads on!

Me neither. After all these years, the speech synth remains my favourite thing about the TI I can tell you a little story about that TI speech synth. Back in 1989, I tought my girlfriend to read using the TI speech synth. She had been brought up in children's homes and had had a rough upbringing and relatively little access to education. She had real trouble with reading and writing, though it was clear to anyone that spent any time with her that she was very intelligent indeed, just hadn't had the access to education. She was rather ashamed of her reading skills, and didn't like to sit one-on-one to practice (not reading, anyway! ) so I wrote her a program in TI-BASIC that taught her to spell using the speech synth. It would say a word and she would have to spell it out. If she didn't get it after three tries it would spell it out character by character. It kept a score, and recorded her scores to disk so she could see her progress. She used the hell out of that program. She would sit with headphones on and go right through it. Once she had a basic grasp of reading, a basic nucleus, so to speak, her reading abilities just exploded - her natural intelligence just took over and she did the rest herself. About three years ago she went back to college and did her exams. She passed them all. She publicly credits me with teaching her how to read. Bless her.

Ah! I just had that conversation with my wife, too, only this time, the item in question was a 1981 Schecter Stratocaster.

Forth *is* weird :-)

There are alternatives: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SCSI2SD-3-5-includes-new-8GB-Genuine-SanDisk-microSD-card-adapter-/191702327688?hash=item2ca2596188:g:z4AAAOSwFnFWBHDt

Yes that's a gem. I'll put it on the add list!

Also, try: 10000 DATA "32","90","50","300","21","3","5","CHICKEN" It might make a difference. It does on the ZX Spectrum, as it stores integers in internal floating-point format.

I don't think so. IIRC, the very simple bus decoding on the TI motherboard means that some types of special cycles are mis-interpreted. This is why we are told in the Editor Assembler manual that we cannot use the CLKON and CLKOF instructions, for example.

Welcome Buck - nice to see you posting here!

It's got a very nice ZX Spectrum/Retro feel to it. Love it! I see it says EK! when you hit something, I assume, therefore, that it's written by a Yorkshireman

Me too! I do the same thing! I've also started to recently do that, as I'm now adopting the use of labels with > 6 characters. Finding unique 6 character labels for TurboForth sometimes required some inventive thinking! Not surprising when you see how many labels are in it:

I've often thought about updating the editor/assembler manual. Correcting the errors, changing the rather obtuse text, and providing more examples and best practices.

From what I remember the 99/2 is fast. It uses the 9995 cpu. Can't remember now but it may have no video hardware at all. Done in software as it is on the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81. Anyone know?