Casey

The 1571 can read and write MFM formatted disks, of which MS-DOS is one type. I know there were programs made for the 128 that would allow you to read/write to MS-DOS disks (Big Blue Reader is one). Somewhere buried in my mind I used a procedure involving CP/M to do this, but I have no recollection of how to do it, or where I found it. COMPUTE! magazine published an article that contained a program that would copy PC disks on a 128 with a 1571. A google search found a page where a person used this utility program to make something that will make MS-DOS boot disks for PCs using a Commodore 128, a 1571, and an SD2IEC device that contains an image of the DOS boot disk. Rather impressive! Edit: I think the 1581 can do this also

I think also that BASIC 2 on the 64 and VIC-20 has the same slow garbage collection routine as PET BASIC 2.0, doesn't it? I remember COMPUTE! articles talking about that relating to the 64. The 128's BASIC 7.0 had the fast routine that PET BASIC 4.0 had (or maybe it was even faster?)

BITD I had a 128 and a 1571 (purchased from Sears actually!) that was given to me for Christmas. I used it 99% of the time in 64 mode as I didn't have a monitor for it (TV only). Aside from a few 128 BASIC games published in magazines, the only thing 128 mode had going for it was a lot of the later 64 games were set up to autoboot on a 128, set up the cartridge identifier, reset into 64 mode and continue loading. CP/M had one useful feature for me. It was possible to take an MS-DOS formatted disk, read in an ASCII file in CP/M, and transfer it to a CBM disk that I could use with a C64 word processor. But it was an elaborate procedure to do that. Otherwise I never used CP/M.

Has anyone experienced any issues with disk images either not being written to, or being wrecked? I have a “The VIC 20” on the current firmware and a few times I’ve noticed things like high score files on disk images not being saved even though the program thinks it saved them. I also managed to wreck a .71 disk image somehow that whenever is mounted, any access returns a 74,DRIVE NOT READY error, and it won’t format. I’ve tried 2 different USB sticks.

I received my 99/4A for Christmas in 1983. I had asked my parents (I was 8 years old) for an Atari 2600. My parents bought the TI 99/4A and several game cartridges for it because all of them were cheaper than an Atari. I remember we had Donkey Kong (which crashed and we exchanged it for Pac Man), TI Invaders, Dragon Mix (Math game), and my dad also bought Household Budget Management. Shortly after, we got a JCPenney cassette recorder and one of the TI tapes (Oldies But Goodies Games I). I never got to see that computer work in color - just had a black and white TV with it, but it really got my interested in computers. I never had any expansion devices, or Extended BASIC. That computer eventually had a keyboard that would repeat every key a million times when typed and it went away. Later on I had a Commodore 128, then PCs and Macs and back to PCs. Years later I got interested in the TI again, and bought an unopened beige one on Ebay (The one I grew up with was beige, so it holds memories for me) and that’s what I have now. I don’t use it much, but I have it hooked up to a TIPI and with the FinalGROM it does get occasional use.

I grew up in central Iowa. My grade school had Apple IIs (1 per classroom by 1984). Mostly IIes but some II+s (and one Bell & Howell II+). Junior high and high school - each room had an Apple IIe (there was 1 IIgs). By my 10th grade year (1990), a handful of classrooms had Macintosh Classics instead of Apple IIes. The computer lab had a room full of Apple IIes that were placed with Compaq 386 PCs my senior year. The writing classroom had about 8 or so PCs of various types (IBM PC XTs, and Hyundai 386s I believe) and 8 Xerox CP/M machines.

Correct. The FinalGROM is not a program storage device; rather it’s a cartridge image storage device. For program storage you’d need a NanoPEB, a TIPI, a cassette recorder, or something else along those lines.

I never had the hardware for it, but a Commodore 128 with GEOS 128, an REU and a 1571 and/or 1581 drive would probably make for a very good classic word processing system. I think GEOS 2.0 includes a spelling checker also but maybe not a thesaurus. Tricky would be exchanging the files with a more modern computer because of the special GEOS file format. I’m not sure GEOS has a way to save a file in a plain ASCII format, but maybe there is a converter somewhere. Back in the day I had a 128, but did not have an 80-column monitor, so I always just used SpeedScript from COMPUTE! in 64 mode for my word processing needs. A very fast no frills (and very cheap) word processor. I think there was a spelling checker released to work with it, but not sure about that. I also used Word Writer 5 for the 64 which came with a spelling checker as well as an 80-column print preview mode even on the 64. Both were capable of saving out files in ASCII format, though at least for SpeedScript, that isn’t the default.

What about the “stringy floppy” drives that were essentially endless tapes? TI never released their version due to it being deemed unreliable, but it did come out for a few other computers with the promise of cheap, fast storage. I know it came out for the Commodore computers but I don’t know anyone who bought one. I’d argue that the 1581 disk drive for the Commodore computers also failed in the marketplace, primarily because it wasn’t a 1541. Commodore never made the transition to 3 1/2” disks.

I received the full sized “The VIC 20” yesterday. I have not compared the list of included software with “The 64” but there seem to be a fair number of VIC 20 games included in the Carousel. Feels like more than what The 64 includes. The other difference is that it offers VIC 20 mode as the “default” default instead of 64 mode, but in all other respects, it’s the same as the 64.

My folks bought a TI 99/4A for me for Christmas in 1983 when I had asked for an Atari 2600. TI was closing out their computers, so the 99/4A was cheaper than an Atari and that’s why they bought it, along with several cartridge games. 3 years later I was given a Commodore 128 and 1571 disk drive, and I used those all through high school until my senior year when I bought a Tandy 1000 RL, then RLX, then RSX in rapid succession (each was a trade in of the previous one and didn’t actually cost me any extra).

There’s an excellent beginners assembly language book I just happened to read through that specifically brought up the subject of sound generation and the need for an LIMI 2/LIMI 0 pair in the main loop to make sound work. It’s aimed at the Mini Memory cartridge with the Line By Line assembler, but it had a lot of good information for a beginner in it. COMPUTE!’s Beginners Guide to Assembly Language on the TI 99/4A. You can find that I think on archive.org as a PDF. It might be worth taking a look through, even if you are planning to use Editor/Assembler.

From a hardware perspective they are very similar - Commodore BASIC doesn’t know what a disk drive is either - it just sends commands out to device 8 and device 8 does whatever was asked of it. This is nearly exactly how TI BASIC works. It just looks for a DSR named “DSK1” and passes the rest of the information you supply along with it. The difference on the TI is that Disk Manager cartridge doesn’t add any commands to TI BASIC, which is unlike how DOS works on the Atari or what the DOS Wedge does. Atari BASIC can initialize floppy disks with an XIO command, and the Commodore DOS Wedge can make it easier for you to send the “new” command to the disk drive, but Disk Manager doesn’t do that to TI BASIC. It would be possible to add a CALL FORMAT command to a cartridge that would add the command to TI BASIC, but the TI Disk Manager doesn’t do that. More difficult is that you can’t easily display a disk directory in TI BASIC without writing a program. Some disk managers (and some Extended BASICs) have a subprogram to return a disk directory but natively you don’t have that.

The Tandy 2000 came out before the Tandy 1000 - so really the statement should be “The Tandy 1000 was cheaper because it wasn’t as powerful as the 2000” - But they really were 2 different markets. The 2000 was to be the ultimate business machine. The 1000 was a reaction to (and a decent clone of) the IBM PCjr.

I had the opposite experience. I had the TI 99/4A first, and then a Commodore 128, which spent 98% of its time in 64 mode. After all the commands that TI BASIC has that the 64’s BASIC 2.0 does not, I felt the Commodore had a steeper learning curve. But I love both platforms. All that said - TIPI and Force Command, and many of the newer things are things that no one who designed the TI could have envisioned. The fact that the TI’s operating system allows for devices that were never pictured to just work when designed properly is a really powerful thing. One nice thing about the TIPI is that the config file can be changed easily within TI BASIC using the normal file processing commands. I suspect if someone ever designed a VICPI, it would be similar though - either with its own device number on the serial bus, or accessed via a SYS if it plugged into the cartridge port.

How hard would it be to have the label printed on it in the style of Hex-Bus Interface seen here ? (With “Speech Synthesizer” of course) - this would match the style of the beige 99/4A perfectly. http://aug.99er.net/unreleased.htm

Here’s my test program for this, in TI BASIC: 100 OPEN #1:”DSK1.TEST”,OUTPUT,INTERNAL,VARIABLE 254 110 PRINT #1:1,2,3,4,5,”CASEY” 120 PRINT #1:6,7,8,9,10,”CASEY” 130 CLOSE #1 140 OPEN #2:”DSK1.TEST”,INPUT,INTERNAL,VARIABLE 254 150 INPUT #2:A,B,C 160 PRINT A,B,C 170 INPUT #2:D,E,F 180 PRINT D,E,F 190 CLOSE #2 Results from running this program: 1 2 3 6 7 8

If I was going to move a + across the screen from left to right in TI BASIC on row 3, I would do it this way: 100 CALL CLEAR 110 R=3 120 FOR I=1 TO 32 130 CALL HCHAR(R,I,ASC(“+”)) 140 CALL HCHAR(R,I,32) 150 NEXT I In Extended BASIC, you could simplify it: 100 CALL CLEAR 110 FOR I=1 TO 28 120 DISPAY AT(3,I):”+”::DISPLAY AT(3,I):” “ 130 NEXT I One thing that isn’t obvious to a person new to the TI: while the screen is 32 columns wide, PRINT and DISPLAY will only use the middle 28 columns, while CALL HCHAR can access all 32. Column 1 for DISPLAY AT is the same as column 3 when used with CALL HCHAR.

This is also possible in TI BASIC, but it’s cumbersome compared to Extended BASIC. Using your example: 100 FOR I=1 TO LEN(A$) 110 CALL HCHAR(10,10+I-1,ASC(SEG$(A$,I,1))) 120 NEXT I

One thing that happened that I didn’t expect. I typed CALL LOAD(-2,244,3) to change the screen colors to white on blue. Leaving XB 2.8 with BYE and coming back in, it remembered that. I turned off the power to 99/4A, turned it back on, and it still remembered that. Then I remembered my Jedimatt 32K was plugged into power, so I unplugged it, plugged it back in after about 15 seconds, and XB 2.8 still remembers the color setting I made. I turned off the console, plugged in TI Extended BASIC instead of the FG99, entered in CALL PEEK(-2,A,B)::PRINT A;B and got back 244,3. Where could these values be kept when the power is off? If I CALL LOAD(-2,244,0) then inside TI Extended BASIC, turn the power off, put back the FG99, and go back into XB 2.8, CALL PEEK(-2,A,B)::PRINT A;B printed 244 and 0. The result of CALL PEEK(-8,etc) you asked for, printed this for me: 145,0,0,16,7,240,244,0

I tried to attach my NanoPEB to see if I could answer a question above. Either it no longer works or I don’t know where I’ve put the proper power supply for it, but I couldn’t get it to work. When I reattached the TIPI, now, I get a purple screen with light blue letters, and CALL PEEK(-2,A,B) returns 93 and 1. The only other change I made was I did an apt update to update the OS on the Pi.

I just did this with my FinalGrom and I got 0 and 0 right after power up and choosing it from the FG99 menu.

This is to the composite input on your monitor/TV? My NIB 99/4A that I got 2 years ago looks like that also - maybe not quite to that extent. But I can see vertical lines going down the screen and some color fringing as well, depending on the colors. Black background with white letters is very rainbowy. It’s always been this way.

DM3 was going to be bundled with the Hex Bus floppy disk controller/drive, right? (That’s my recollection from reading the manual a while back). The Hex Bus controller was designed for 4 drives also? (1 drive/controller, and 3 drives without controllers?). I do wish the Hex Bus interface and peripherals had been released for the 99/4A. Would have made for a much more cost effective system.

Back when I had a 99/4 and a sizable cart collection, the only carts I had that wouldn’t show up on the 99/4’s menu were the ROM only Atarisoft carts. Parsec would show up but didn’t work because of the bitmap mode it requires that the 99/4 doesn’t have. Selecting Parsec from the menu simply cleared the screen and then returned to the color bar screen.