Ksarul

Star Maze was an educational title programmed by ScottForesman, manufactured for them by TI, and sold by either ScottForesman or a company named Tronics. There are several label variants (blue lettering on white background, red lettering on white background, and red lettering on white background with the Tronics logo. There are five other math games cartridges in the series. None of them are terribly expensive. I bought two of the other titles within the last couple of months NIB for under $20 each. Some of the titles have been offered for up to $75, but usually don't sell at that price. Loose cartridges are much less--$7 to $10 range, unless they happen to be one of the extremely rare combo modules that put two of the six titles in a single module case. Those have the names of the two games on the labels (they have red letters on white background) along with one of the following: Module A, Module B, or Module C. Some of these latter modules also come in color cases (I have them in red and yellow). There are a lot of other ScottForesman modules for reading and math, as well as a set of school management modules. The school management modules are unbelievably rare--I know of less than a dozen of any individual title in the series that survives, and a goodly number of those don't have the documentation. The reading and math cartridges are relatively common, like the Star Maze game you found. I hope this helps.

Lee, would you want the Inverted 64K version that Jon's boards have or the 512K Non-Inverted version that I just recently put into the CAD program? The advantage of the latter is that it can also be burned into the 512K Uber-GROM carts once we get those working. Like Jon's cart, it uses a standard DIP EPROM and will work with everything from an 8K to a 512K EPROM. I'll know in a couple of weeks if they work like they're supposed to, as I have a small batch on order for testing. There are a lot of Jon's boards out there too, which is a plus for them (I like both types, but I had a wild hair last weekend and decided to modify the 512K inverted board I pictured in the cartridge thread last week to act as a contiguous 512K cart as opposed to 4 128K cartridges in a single case).

Actually, the N82S23 is a 32word x 8bit chip--not a 32K chip. I'm not sure what they're using it for here. They are using the other three ROMs as a 32K ROM, banked in 8K increments and likely a single 32K ROM with an 8K ROM to give 40K of GROM.

One of the chips is the ROM, and the stack is the simulated GROM. the 4 LS161s are the counters that simulate the GROM address auto-increment feature, the LS139 is doing the bank switching on the ROM. The other two chips are also part of the GROM selection circuitry. What you have is a 40K GROM and 32K ROM cartridge board. Since it is using the 379, it is using the inverted banking mode (unless they've done something on there to modify that, not likely).

I have a few issues of 99 Magazine (the French One), all of TI Revue (German), all of TI Magazine (German), TI FUM (all issues, German), 99 Magazine (The Austrian one), a Swiss one (name escapes me at the moment), the Italian ones that were already mentioned, Computer Kontakt (CK), Computronic, HC, Happy Computer, Computer Flohmarkt, CPU, and a couple of really obscure German ones that were either newsprint or only had one or two issues. I also have some additional French stuff too (Hebdogiciel and Votre Ordinateur). There are about half a dozen others that I can think of that I haven't mentioned here. . .but the names escape me at the moment.

The place I grew up in just had a large collection of random drug addicts wandering around. If you wanted to study the bad effects of any given chemical substance available at the time, there were always two or three subjects using that chemical available for observation. It was a great lesson showing WHY most illicit substances should be avoided. . .

He wants to sing a duet with the computer, maybe?

There is also the alternate reality processing unit. Once mine has identified anything as "real" or "correct," any demonstrations on the part of reality contrary to that worldview are automatically wrong. If one of her friends tells her something, it is as real and correct as a gold bar in her hands (she's a Turk, so she REALLY likes gold, it is a cultural thing with them). Taking her to the ultimate source of the correct information nets the response "they're wrong, my friend knows better" and usually results in a week or so of the icy blast vision or the continuing low-grade volcanic eruption with short blasts of plasma-grade verbal attitude correction attempts. Those are really good weeks to go into hiding in the "junk room." LOLOL

Or I could just buy some clear plastic mix and some blue dye and make her a few of them using my cartridge molds. . .the one up for sale was a test casting made by Gregg to make sure they would work when he made the molds for me. Right now, I only have one option: BLACK, as that was the color I bought when I started the project to make cases.

I know this problem. . .my wife keeps telling me I have too much stuff. The problem is--all of the stuff she complains about is my TI computer stuff. That started about two weeks after we got married. She looked at my European 99/4 and asked what it was. I told her it was a computer. She said it looks old--get rid of it. I picked it up and pointed to the date stamp on the bottom: 0980. She said so what, that means nothing. My response was that this computer was built in the 9th week of 1980, and that I'd had it since it was new. I also noted that it was older than she was, and that she would leave long before it did. . .that war has continued ever since. LOLOL I do need to arrange my collection somewhat though, as I keep misplacing important items in my "junk room" as the wife calls it.

I like the change, Ernie--it will be much easier to download things this way, as it segregates stuff into manageable batches. Many thanks!

Actually, I'd probably use it as well. Look at the bright side of a TI browser project: we can surf the web about as totally safe from a drive-by browser attack as anyone out there, just because the code embedded in the attacks won't be targeted to our operating system. Even if it downloaded, it wouldn't run properly, if at all. Extreme obscurity has its advantages here. . .a few thousand TI users worldwide as opposed to the millions using other systems.

Thanks, Ernie! Having downloaded the ones you put up yesterday, I second the request to do this in some form of zip archive, or at least to add an archive of each group as part of the upload. It is awesome in any event, and I thank you for the work that went into it!

You're correct, Ernie--that section of the PHP1240 manual is the only DM-II manual there ever was.

Yes I did, Greg. I wanted to see how well the conversion routines worked, and I figured it would be best to use one of my smaller project designs. I made a few more than I will need for my experimentation too, just in case. Next up will be either a flat cable Armadillo Interface set (modeled on the original from TI), a Prototyping board (my design), an EGROM Box (modeled on the TI original), a TI-99/4A 128K board (modeled on an original prototype from TI), or a printer/joystick interface board for my Powertran Cortex. I've got completed layouts for all of them, so it is just a matter of time/cost to do them up. Ciro, is your 99/8 one with a card-edge slot or does it have the 50-pin Centronics connector?

They're one and the same. I ran the design through the converter and did the test run just to see what would come out of it. The Gerbers are included in my post from March 2 in this thread. I paid extra to use the black mask and do gold plating on all of the exposed metal, just to see how it would come out. Even with that, the price stayed reasonable. . .and the service was quick too, as I got them in under two weeks.

I decided to have a small number of the 512K ROM-only boards made (20 of them) for experimentation purposes. They came out very nice, as the picture shows--and the price was very reasonable, as I paid about $7.50 each for them.

Actually, I just looked on their site and the Cryoflux is in stock. I did get one of these though--and I was also waffling between it, the Cryoflux, and the DiscFerret.

I'd help on this one, Marc. Let me know when you're ready to start sending things off and I'll send you the necessary postage payment. This also explains the random disk or two I got in the mail from Bill this month--he knows some of the things that interest me. . .

Nice progress, there! I like it. On the screw hole, you might try the range between 1/32 and 1/16 inch. 3/64 is probably a dead-on fit, but I included the others just in case.

Maybe we could print one and make another mold from it. . .

Was he looking for some creative food poisoning, Tim? That tin-lead solder will do wonders for your metabolism. . .and not in a good way.

I figure it is time to upload this one, as it may help decode how TI was thinking when they programmed sound lists. Here's the original documented source code for Parsec, as editable text. It may not be perfect in the GROMs, as I haven't tried to run it through a GPL Assembler (it was written for the TI version, and would require some changes to make it run in the various third-party GPL Assemblers, IIRC). The Assembly portion should assemble correctly now, according to Paul. Parsec_Source_Code.pdf

I own one as well (well, two actually, but one is a spare I bought to get a functioning original microphone and joystick). IIRC, they were only in production for a very short time. I once read that only 200 or so were produced, but that does not match the reality of what I've seen for sale on eBay and from other sources over the years. I suspect the real number to be somewhere closer to 1,000. The hardest things to find for these are the overlays. A lot of them disappeared over the years, and the games that had them, needed them.

How many Web sites still support Gopher? Not too many, I would suppose.