Ksarul

Look at Sega Master Systems or at the Commodore 64. Both use the same horseshoe connector--and both use it very differently. Note also that you monitor was manufactured by Victor Data Systems. Some careful hunting on that front may turn up the connector pin out as well.

This is actually a different board. I know Curtis--and he's had this one for a long time. It does have the daughter board on it for the Hex-Bus interface, but it is definitely missing all four of the custom chips (Amigo, Pollo, Oso, and Mofetta), along with the 9118 VDP. It looks like a clean build board from the last test run they manufactured, though (almost none of those ever made it to final test and assembly stage and are missing a lot of the socketed chips, like this one). The scribed serial number on the underside will tell me more (it is probably in the 250-300 range, if it follows the pattern for the five or six partial boards I own).

With the Forth computer on the cartridge, you can turn the cartridge port into an I/O device supporting neat things like SD cards that you could plug straight into the cartridge, a USB port with built-in drivers for all kinds of nifty devices, or pretty much any other thing that needs a fast computer to talk to it. . .and then feed that resultant data to your happy little TI.

Joy Electronics was trying to close up shop in 2001, due to the frail health of the owner. He passed about a year later and IIRC, Mike Dudeck bought most of his remaining stock at that time.

I like this one, Willsy! So many interesting things going on with the cartridge port lately. . .30 years after Black Friday, and the community is still kicking and doing thing that were unimaginable back in the day. I definitely wants one of these once they're ready. . .

Leave my 100+ years worth of Tom Swift books alone please. LOLOL Seriously though, I understand the need to protect the stuff that one collects (whatever it might be), as the spark that made it into a collection is also the spark that helped preserve it in the first place. I scan the truly rare stuff I've found (like the majority of the developmental engineering documents for the TI-99/8, gleaned from several of the engineers who worked on the system), as my copies are probably the only ones left in some instances. That gets me in hot water with the collectors who had one or the other of these documents and protected it like their "preciouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuusssssssss," but being in that hot water is fine by me, as the information needs to be available to those with the system. It helps that TI gave the community permission to use the information for noncommercial purposes a few years back. It would be nice to have the magazines we don't have available yet digitized--even one helps, as that puts the community one step closer to access to a complete set. We're a community, and we're mostly dedicated to our retro systems--and that is something that is good all around.

My second try made it to 5.4 MB before it choked (it is still in a holding pattern). I'm going to let it run to see what happens this time. . .

I actually tried to download the file. It is humming along slowly for the first 6-7 minutes, and then it goes dead stop, probably until the connection times out, which is why you lost it when you did. I am at 3.4MB, but it still hasn't disconnected me. . .after 5 minutes of absolutely no movement.

Fred Kaal shows up on most of the TI Yahoo! groups, and I think he may even have an account here. He is very responsive once he finds out about a problem with one of his applications or one of the files on his site.

P-Code is a really nice thing to have, especially once you learn how to use it.

Lee, slow and steady is the best way to go for good coding--it eliminates the tendency to hack a solution as opposed to coding one that is bulletproof.

It is a P-Code card.

That will work, Stuart. The PO Box is the best address for me. Many thanks!

I like those labels, Gazoo! I think I'm going to have to make some for the various other cartridges (like the Games/Utility carts for the 512K boards) when I get a chance to play with the label files. Ω, here's a nice opportunity for your wonderful graphics ability--label templates for the Game and Utility Multicarts.

They do work in the cartridge boards, Stuart. I can deliver them to Chicago--or you might just send them to Bob Carmany, as he uses a lot of them programming chips for folks as they need them.

After a careful scan of the date codes on the components, I'm pretty sure this board was assembled at the very end of 1978 or more likely, very early in 1979. None of the components were made after the 49th week of 1978. I'm not sure if I have enough of it to build a fully functional machine, but what I do have will get me pretty close, using a spare case from one of my /4As. It does seem to have some odd functionality built in--like the video modulator (and the channel 3/4 switch on the left hand side of the board). It also has a BNC video connector on the back. I don't see a joystick port, which tells me this one probably had the RF joysticks. It is most unfortunate that the guy who got these disassembled them to get what he thought were the valuable components instead of selling them whole (the disassembly happened long before he sold them, but at least most of the important parts survive).

I just got a truly bizarre item in the mail that I found on eBay last week. Look at the top left board (also the first board in later pictures) in the picture carefully. http://www.ebay.com/itm/121423340946? It has the same general shape as a 99/4A board, but that's about it. I talked to the seller, as it looked like it originally had some kind of daughter board--he hunted around and found that along with a couple of internal power supplies. When I received everything today, the daughter board is the rest of a TI-99/4 computer, and one of the power supplies goes to it to. I strongly suspect this is an actual TI-99/4 prototype!

The MBX went for $31 (I got it). I was a bit surprised, as I was trying to get it for parts since some of it was a bit rough. I'll have to test it to see if it works now. . .

It is an adventure game for the Adventure cartridge--and it is text only on the TI. Adventure International released four TI adventures for it on their own: Sorceror of Claymorgue Castle, Spiderman, Hulk, and the Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.

The board and the parts to build one of your own would cost about $20 (rough guess there, but I know the connectors are about $1.50 each, the rubber feet are about $1.00, the switch is about $1.00, and the other random bits are about $0.50). Note this doesn't include the bare board to put everything onto. Add $10 for assembly and shipping and you come close to that $30 price. Note that is what it would cost to build one now, so anything $30 or less is reasonable. I have seen them quite often in the $20 and under range though, so waiting is also an option.

Oddly enough, quite a few early computer systems used the 320K double density mode--even the IBM PC used it as a valid format for a while. It survived as a valid format through most of the revisions of MS-DOS, even though it was almost never used after DOS 2 or so. It all had to do with the hardware--the drives could work up to 360K, but the reliability of the disk positioning mechanisms was such that an overcautious engineer factored that in by using it at less than capacity to ensure super-reliable functionality. The thing was, by the time everyone was actually using double density, the reliability of the drive mechanisms had increased to the point where the overcautious limitation was no longer relevant. Double density has to do with using the sector between the sectors (the one that was only used for timing in single density mode) for data--the number of sectors is actually irrelevant.

The only physical settings on the card would be the jumpers that set the card as RS-232-1 (with RS-232/1, RS-232/2 and PIO(/1)) or as RS-232-2 (with RS-232/3, RS-232/4 and PIO/2). Everything else is soft switch or part of the DSR code.

You could even make the traveling bits a bit like the alphabetic data streams from the Matrix--once a set number of streams connect across the screen, you win. . .

Actually, the 16-sector Myarc format follows the TI DSDD specification, used in both the Hex-Bus Floppy and the TI DSDD card for the PEB. CorComp didn't follow the TI design docs--and initially sold a lot more cards, so their format became the de facto standard.

On other Storage, I have a pair of Quick Disk drives (2.8" on Hex-Bus). I'm still looking at the possibility of connecting an IEEE-488 compatible drive to one of my IEEE-488 cards. I also have 720K 80-track drives (5.25" and 3.5") on a Myarc controller, and 320K drives on a TI DSDD controller card and also on a Hex-Bus Floppy drive.