Ksarul

Actually, the system is SASI, the predecessor to SCSI. The physical drive is MFM, but it has an additional WD SASI controller board attached to it. The SASI controller talks to the Personality Card. Maximum disk size that it will recognize is 15MB, although the one up on eBay only has a 5MB drive. I have one as well. It was also the reason the Myarc HFDC recognized WDSx as a potential Hard Disk number.

Awesome work, Rasmus! Many thanks for what you've done here. My 8-year-old loves this type of game and now he has one he can play on his TI!

Andrea, I know the disks are in the Program Pool for the TI Club Errorfree and also in the library of the Dutch User's Group. For Errorfree, you might want to try to contact Wolfgang Bertsch through the Errorfree website: http://www.errorfree.de/ For the Dutch group, try Berry Harmsen. Here's the Dutch website: http://www.ti-99.nl/

You want to look for some disks by a Dutch programmer named Eric Paul Rebel. He made some routines that do exactly as you wish and that also allow you to use multicolored fonts while you do it. He did four disks of software the he distributed freely to the community back around 1990 or so.

Kevan, note that the European TI had a six-pin DIN connector on the back--not the same as the US five-pin one. It does still have an audio line though, and that is the one that you'd use with the F18A.

The PEB itself was released in April of 1982, IIRC. I bought mine right after they came out--some of my cards were the beige enamel variety and others were the brushed clamshell. This was the norm up until the late 1983 production boards--most of those started showing up in the metallized black cases (a thin coat of metallized material inside to help capture any stray electronic emissions). The cards were pretty much the same though from beginning to end--only the cases changed. Myarc initially used surplus metal TI clamshells (mostly for their Personality Cards), and later used surplus plastic TI clamshells for their other cards. Morningstar used metal TI clamshells for their CP/M card and for their 128K RAM card. CorComp made their own metal cases for a while, although their boards went through a number of revisions, with their final boards sold without clamshells at all. Foundation and Atronic both manufactured their own clamshells for the cards they built. That's pretty much it for PEB cards that came with clamshells of any kind from the manufacturer, so far as I know.

@Rasmus, I have a 128K layout that I made for Jon a few years ago. I can provide you the files if you want them. I also have a 512K version that uses two switches to turn one of the 128K carts into four, all inside a single case--if you don't install the switches, it is just a vanilla 128K cart. These variants were the trigger that set me on the path to making the fully self-contained 512K cart with Jon and Tursi.

Great little update to the software GROM-Buster!

There are a couple of different multicart options for the 99/4A. If you use a 64K Guidry board, you can make a multicart that holds up to 8 of the ROM-only cartridges--so long as they are 8K each (this won't work with the ones that are 16K ban-switched or any cart with GROM). There are also designs for 128K and 512K versions of this (we only made a few of those as test objects, but the layouts to make more of them exist). The final option is a board with 512K of 8K ROM banks and 128K of 8K GROM "slots," which work a bit differently than banks do--up to 5 slots are visible to the computer at a time, allowing it to effectively emulate almost any TI cartridge made (there are about a dozen or so possible exceptions which would have to be modified to work with it). It is not ready for release as of yet, though we did a partial demonstration of it at the Chicago TI Faire this past November.

If my parsing of the hash eBay uses to obfuscate user IDs is correct, this probably went to Ciro.

The daughter boards were an old-time mod for the TRS-80 Model I machines. The ones I have are from the mid-eighties. @ MZAPF Actually, TI disk contolllers used a lot of different chips, Michael. Early CorComp cards use the WD2793; Myarc used the WD 1770 or WD1772 on their floppy controllers (varied by manufacturing date); CorComp, Atronic, and BwG used the WD1773; Percom Data and TI both used the WD1771; and TI used the NEC765 on their unreleased DSDD controller.

Thanks, Nathan!

One of these days I'm going to have to try and mount one of the odd little daughter boards I have that combine a 1771 and a 1773 on the same board. they were designed for a TRS-80, but they are self-contained, so it might be possible to make them work with a TI controller. . .

Kevan, here's a nice console case for you. . . http://www.ebay.com/itm/161221749092 a bit pricey, though!

I'd probably order another 2-3 of them Greg. . .

I can quickly answer the first question: Load the program into memory and then from the command line type LIST "PIO" and it will go to your printer. If you're using the RS-232, just change it to LIST "RS232/1" To LIST parts of the program to the screen, just type LIST 100-200 to list those lines only to the screen. That way you can step your way through the program in chunks on the screen. The answers are found on page II-22 of the TI User's Reference Guide. It is available for download here (along with a plethora of TI books): http://pergrem.com/tibooks/

That is a neat escape-from-the-sandbox trick--and it eliminates the need for a GROM Buster! It is probably one of the neatest short utility programs for the TI that I've ever seen. Many thanks for having taken the time to write it! The more you experiment with the broken sandbox, the more useful it becomes.

Is your TI DSDD controller stable, Gary? I have two of them. One I built up from a parts kit that I bought on eBay in 2000 or so and the other was bought complete--but modified to allow it to remain stable over longer periods (apparently, they tended to overheat, which was part of the reason they hadn't been released yet). Which version of the DM-3 cart came with yours? One of mine had a TI Engineering User Group splash screen and the other was the standard release version. I also have the assembly instructions in one of my documentation books.

And now the auction was ended early for an error in the listing. . .hmmmmmmmmmmmm. Definitely not a seller I could trust. His word seems to last only as long as his breath.

Note on V2.2 consoles: it is possible to run the third-party cartridges on them, but it requires a device called a GROM Buster attached to the side port to do it. These are not very common, but were made by two different manufacturers: CorComp and Navarone. On TI and the transition to beige, that was a work-in-progress when they pulled out of the market. Here is a picture of what the speech synthesizer case would have looked like in beige: http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2F131108572954 The device in the picture is a Hex-Bus Interface, which connected the TI to a whole bunch of peripherals (I have an RS-232, Printer-Plotter, 80-Column Printer, Modem, 2.8 Quick Disk, 5.25 Floppy Drive, and a Wafertape Drive for it). Many of the peripherals show up on eBay regularly, although some are quite rare. The Hex-Bus Interface doesn't show up very often either. I also have a set of the TI Joysticks in Beige, and the MBX Units were also only released in beige, although I've seen pictures of one that was in the older Black and Silver color scheme (it was a prototype).

Every person on here gives us great ideas to work with--it is why I stay here. I'm glad I could help. Please post your parts list and such if you get a chance--you may not be the only one to build one of these, as I know several people were looking for a more-or-less indestructible joystick a while back, and this definitely fits the bill!

There are a lot of games with an option for two players, so being able to switch it would be useful. There are also a few games that reverse which stick is one and which is two, so that would help you to sort things out quickly in those cases as well. The whole idea of being able to select which stick it is makes this a nice innovation. I like it.

Any of the 5.25 drives listed above as QD (720K formatted/1MB unformatted) spins at 300 RPM and will work with any TI (or Geneve) configured to run 80-track drives. I have something like half a dozen TEAC FD-55F drives. On the Epson 40-track 3.5 drives--I have two of them squirreled away, bought as part of the same group buy that the Wiesbaden group arranged. I think they were called SMD-165s, if the Epson PX-10 reference I found is correct. Just look at the diagram on the page for the drive reference. http://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl/comp/px8/pf10/ Actually, that led me to look even further--there are six Epson 3.5 drives that used the 40-track format. Go here for the chart: ftp://ftp.epson.com/desktop/OEMFDD.TXT The ones bought by the Wiesbaden group were either SMD-120 or SMD-160 drives (I'd have to pull one of mine out of storage to verify exactly which one it was).

It uses the same GROM Base, and I'm pretty sure it uses the same GROM ID as one of the XB GROMs. I know that there is a version for one of the GRAM devices that shifts it to a different address though--but that won't help you if you plan to use physical hardware (at least until the 512K cart is ready).

Here's a double bonus auction for someone: a cartridge expander with a CorComp load interrupt switch. http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2F301085688709 The price is a bit high, but not excessive, and the load interrupt switches don't show up all that often.