Ksarul

Isn't that a problem we all have at one time or another?

Here's one I've bought from before, but they are 200nS chips. 130 of them for $260 plus about $20 shipping--but he also accepts reasonable offers. Most TI hardware has no trouble at 250nS, some will work at even slower rates. IIRC, most original TI DSR ROMS were 350nS parts. . .

You may run into some serious issues with TI BASIC then, as it is one of the very few machines that coded their BASIC to the ANSI Standard dialect, as opposed to the Microsoft BASIC dialects used by almost every other machine out there. There are a lot of similarities, but there are places where the ANSI approach is a bit different. Without using the solution @mizapf suggested, you are pretty much doomed to a 28 column display on the TI when using only the standard BASIC command set. There are no easy tricks to open up the other four columns. There are lots of ways to do this using some of the extensions to TI BASIC. XB256, XB GEM, and T40 have all been mentioned as possible ways around the limitation.

There are oodles of these on eBay. I have bought about a thousand of them from various sellers over the years--and most of them were good once cleaned and erased.

There are a lot of good websites for it. There is the WHT repository, the TI Gameshelf, Ninerpedia, TI-99 Forever, the TI Tech Pages, the Hexbus site, Mainbyte, the Italian User's Group site, Bromosel's site, Infospot, the Errorfree site, 99er.net and several more that I haven't mentioned. Look on the Hexbus site for a lot of online TI programming books.

Although it didn't make it to cartridge, it was one of the titles you could program into a ROMOX cartridge at one of their cartridge kiosks. I suspect a manual did exist for those users who bought it that way, but one never knows, as the stores may not have provided manuals for any of the titles in their equipment just to keep costs down. I wonder if Kyle knows, as he saw a few of them in use BITD. I'll have to ping him on that (unless he actually shows up here in the near future--which would be a good thing).

I built a character generation program in an early version of Advanced BASIC for the Geneve back in the early nineties--for 1st Edition AD&D. It took a long time to write and to get to do what I wanted it to do--and even then, it only helped the user generate characters, select race, class, skills, and spells. I was working on adding the ability to purchase equipment when I had to withdraw from the hobby for a couple years while I dealt with the aftermath of a nasty divorce. I should probably dig it back out and work on it again. Look at PCGEN for a lot of what you are looking for in this area. Realms of Antiquity is definitely a completely different style of game engine. It doesn't lend itself to use as a board game adventure as written--and changing it to work that way would actually require almost as much work as the original game did. It would probably be a lot easier to start a game with that end in mind from the start.

There is an important qualifier here: which edition of the game do you play? I tend to use 1st Edition or 3.5 personally, but I suspect others here will be all over the map. As to the challenge of the TI presence, if you get your group onto a virtual table (mine does this) you have the DM maintaining the game board (we use regular miniatures and a plexiglass board on camera). No problem using your TI as a game master aid at all in that environment. . .and you get to maintain proper social distancing while enjoying the group interaction too.

The port is the same as it is for the other systems. I suspect the cartridge is loading the game and either storing it in RAM or feeding the data to the VDP memory in the Pyuuta Jr. I'll have to dig mine out and see if the case can be opened without destroying it (some Pyuuta cartridge case styles do not like being opened).

For any of you with the ability to buy stuff on Yahoo! Japan, there is a cassette interface up for sale right now. These don't come up very often at all (it is only the third one I've ever seen). I already have one, so I don't plan to bid on it.

I have plenty of the SAMS PEB cards assembled, but the sidecar ones are made by someone else.

In that mode, you could just resurrect the design for the TIM. It works as an Analog RGB 80-column card using a Yamaha V9958 and gives you up to 192K of video memory. It wouldn't give you VGA output, which is the real advantage of the F18A, but it would be a discrete component device that would easily fit into the keyboard case.

99er.net has version 3.2.1 which I downloaded a few minutes ago. Here it is, just in case TI99-PC 3.2.1.zip

Make sure you are using the TI splitter cable to break the 25-pin connector on the TI into two standard RS-232 ports as well, as the connector on the card is not wired like a standard RS-232 port. It is two ports on a single connector. Once broken out, the 25/9 pin cable you are using should work on either port, as long as it is a null modem cable.

I really have to make a bunch of these into 512K/1024K/2048K cartridge images, just for the fun of it. . .

Sounds like my kind of place. She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed would have an absolute conniption at the suggestion though. She thinks 70 degrees Farenheit is insufferably cold.

Of course, the prices in those auctions are high enough to choke on. . .that is nearly ten times what they're worth.

SAMS doesn't work that way, normally. As noted, it doesn't hold memory when powered off, although Zeropower SRAMs can get around that issue (note: they are much more expensive than the regular RAM chips). There isn't a DSR on the card either, so no integrated disk management opportunities. Lastly, the card uses a memory mapper chip that provides a 32K window into the total memory space of the card. You need to manage where that window is with your software. Existing SAMS-aware software isn't expecting it to be used as a ramdisk and will step all over it. It could be used to store lots of data for a program written to use it that way (Realms of Antiquity and many other SAMS programs do this), but using it as a stand alone ramdisk is probably a whole lot more trouble than it is worth.

I came up with the same two documents you did. There doesn't seem to be a lot of data on it online. . .

TI Sold Munchman and TI Invaders on disk BITD, but both were E/A 5 versions of the released cartridges. The disks were never common back then for some reason. It took me a long time to track original copies of both of them down. I think the original version of Munchman may have actually been released as part of the TI Cares packet sent out to user groups. I think I have a complete set of those disks somewhere in my collection (and these TI disks were also the source for the Lasso and Crossfire files). It took me 35 years, but I actually tracked down one of the Qual cartridges for Crossfire, as that one never made it past the Qual run before TI withdrew from the market. I know there are about 100 of them out there, but I have never seen anyone else that has one of them. They were bought up by the IUG and sold to their membership BITD, and most of them were never seen again. In answer to the question though, I believe it was Tex-Comp that sold the prototype version of Munchman on disk, as they packaged and sold most of the programs contained in the TI Cares package. Sold is a bit of a misnomer though, as they sold them basically for the cost of production/distribution, in a similar fashion to their other "backup copies" of TI software and cartridges.

Scans of the TI materials from the various UK magazines would definitely be a good thing, as a lot of that material isn't available online. I only have a small number of UK magazine issues. Most of my European magazine collection consists of items from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, France, and Italy.

If you are looking for a respun GRAM Kracker, no. The FinalGROM cartridge provides some of the functionality of the GRAM Kracker (the ability to load and run cartridge files) and the UberGROM cartridge allows you to make permanent cartridge copies of cartridges that contain ROM and/or GROM. These are the only two GROM emulations in production, although I have been considering respinning the old Wiesbaden Supermodul II, as it has a lot of great functionality too.

Based on our earlier conversations on the subject, I knew this would make you a happy person, @gferluga

The Muchman prototype version on disk (which is what you bought) has been available to the community for about 20 years now. It is not in the form of a ROM on that disk, it is already a set of extracted files. There is a soft copy of the program in the directory of MAME cartridges that @mizapftried to point you to. Probably the most important bit of data for you is that this prototype code is not at all rare. Any of us with interest in those things probably already has a copy of it or knows where to get it. TI prototype cartridges in general are a bit odd, as they use specialized chips called GROMs. These chips could be emulated using an EGROM board (making for a very heavy cartridge). I have a number of these. They are NOT at all common, and don't exist at all for most titles (and never did, as TI used a special hardware device to test most of their code before committing it to GROM). There were a couple of different devices here--an EGROM Box (could simulate 5 GROMs at once, which was necessary for larger cartridges) or a GSIM (used simulated GRAM to load and run ANY cartridge file). I have examples of all of these devices and more in my collection. What most people call TI prototypes are actually pre-production copies made to verify the manufacturing process prior to moving to full production. Generally 100-150 copies of a cartridge were made as part of these qualification runs. QUAL copies of most cartridges survive (and their code is the standard production code). What makes each one special is the fact that it came from a QUAL run and the limited number of cartridges made in the QUAL run for that title. There are even a couple where the QUAL run is the ONLY physical cartridge version to turn up, but it is much more common to find soft copies of unreleased titles on disk, as that was the way TI stored them BITD. None of the disks are rare, as whenever a new one turns up, it is copied and makes the rounds in the community. I hope this helps. . .and as @fabrice montupetnoted, the prototype copy in his FinalGROM cartridge is his favorite version of this game.

I've done about 60-70 pages of TI schematics using Visio and converting the output to A3 sheets in PDF. These scale nicely to whatever size you want (Assuming you have a printer capable of handling larger sizes). The A3 sheets will print in most of the larger multifunction photocopiers (and even downsize nicely to Legal paper). I have built templates for a lot of the common chips and components used on the TI cards. It is just a matter of getting the wiring in place and building additional templates when a new component or chip turns up. I haven't had much time to do this in the last year or so, but I do plan to continue it until all of them are respun and usable. More folks working in this space would be good--especially for those third-party boards that we have no schematics for at all. . .I have all of the TI, Horizon, and CorComp stuff in my queue now, but there are plenty more out there.