Vorticon

What generally breaks is the plastic front panel. The rest is built like a tank and will survive practically anything.

Love it!

Chaining is easily done in XB by simply saving the needed shared variables to disk then reading them back. The screen and character definitions are all preserved automatically. Both Stratego and Close Action used chaining (Close Action has 4 chained programs!). Granted this process does slow things down a little when switching from one program to the other, but it's tolerable. So yes, in a sense you can have programs of unlimited size in XB, just as the manual states! 😁

Ah interesting scheme. I think it might be worth increasing the index buffer to 8K and having 2048 lines available. With Adamed, it turned out that 1024 lines was not as big as I thought it would be particularly with assembly programs where a line might only contain a few characters...

Did not know that. Thanks for the info

I am assuming by 80 columns we will be using the F18A correct? Otherwise I agree that it would be very cumbersome to use horizontal scrolling. As for graphics commands, it would be nice to have access to the bitmap screen since setting it up from XB can be tricky, along with basic hires plotting commands (pixel, box, circle, line). The thing is, RXB and XB GEM already have most of the requested features except for 80 column and full screen editing. What we lack is a single completely integrated XB product with most of their important features incorporated. A tall order.

How is a line represented internally in TiVi? With Adamed, I had a fixed 1024 line limit as well, but that was because each line was fixed in length (40 characters) regardless of the number of characters it actually contained, obviously not the most efficient use of memory by any stretch, but much easier to code The reason I ask is that I am curious about the reason(s) behind the 1024 line limit.

For me you already hit on my top priorities for XB: - Full screen editor in 80 col. - SAMS support with the user shielded from the 4K blocks limitation - Integrated assembler for in-line assembly. This is huge as it will help mitigate some of XB's slow execution. I would add a feature like CALL IO in RXB which is incredibly powerful for low-level hardware access. The amount of work this would entail is phenomenal, so I will not be holding my breath any time soon But there is nothing wrong with dreaming!

You need a special parallel printer cable with the proper connector for the RS232 card parallel port. You can purchase one here: https://iec.net/product/ti99-4-parallel-cable-to-smith-corona-printers-5/

Nice work! FYI the XB256 docs are under the Isabella folder (the XB compiler). This is going to make next year's 10 liner contest so much more interesting

These are the copies from the tigameshelf.net. I just tested them in Classic 99 and they work as they should, including the bookmark function. Incidentally, we had quite a discussion on the Yahoo group maybe 10-12 years ago titled "God in the Machine" which I started after I found out that Chris had included a large religious diatribe at the end of the game which I thought was very sneaky and completely out of place in a game. Mind you it was not his religious views which irritated me (I strictly abide by the dictum of live and let live), but the fact that he forced them on the players of his game. He later contacted me apologizing and told me that at the time he was going through a very religious life phase which he was now over with Interesting tidbit... Mexico2.dsk Mexico1.dsk

It's like a game of Clue

Ah thanks!. I updated the TI Lander entry on the tigameshelf.net site with the cartridge file.

I am saving this in my vault of essential knowledge! I actually keep a OneNote folder with all important TI info (usually programming related) for easy access from anywhere.

I'm afraid I'm going to need a bit more direction than that... I've never done a cart previously although I do understand the general principles 😐

Ah. I thought it was not a simple process

Except that no one outside of Willsy knows how that was done! There are a couple of bugs that I corrected in the disk version but not in the cart version because Willsy no longer remembers how he got it done. Apparently it was a fairly involved process. He promised to work on it once life permits

Your archive is better organized. I would keep it unless it's a bother or costs money... I do use it occasionally.

I have never done it myself. Is there some sort of converter out there?

I wrote the program in c99 and compiled it, so it should be feasible theoretically.

I was just told that Bowling Champ was made by John Behnke. Anyone here can corroborate either way?

Thanks for the info. I will correct the XB Bowling credits with the next update. I will also post this version of Lunar Lander as well.

Oh wow! That is impressive! Who is the author? Never saw this before.

So looking forward to this. It makes my Adamed editor for the Coleco Adam look so primitive! 😄

Here's an interesting version of Asteroids by Peter Hodie written in assembly. XB autoload. (from the tigameshelf.net) Aster.dsk