kl99

thx, very interesting

Whenever someones brings in 9938/9958 extensions for the TI-99 and compares them to the F18a, one should not forget that all those products were never about creating a chip, but creating an interface for an already produced video chip which was made by a professional chip company, being the project/solution mainly about the interface surrounding that chip. In contrast to all those projects, the F18a project is about producing a video chip itsself, with a self-designed schematic, based on FPGA chip technology (#1, #2). So actually you would need to compare all those 9938/9958cards with a not-yet-there PEB video card, equipped with 192k memory, that has a F18a in its VDP socket. Since the firmware of the chip can be modified, that should be doable. The question is, how many PEBs are out with active users to to get acceptance from the community to make such a project worth it. I see many 99ers going with the F18a/nanoPEB system as default setup now.

Check out this thread from the Colecovision forum: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/216268-my-first-test-on-the-tms9918/ Maybe this can be used also on our system? Both systems share the same VDP.

Hi, i am from the TI-99/4a community, our computer also uses the TMS9918(a) as VDP. Your tests look very promising. I wasn't quite able to follow/see, how you achieve more than 16 colors. Are you using some some special video hardware, or is the Atarimax Ultimate SD cartridge solely used as ROM storage here to execute your prog? If you do it in software: Are you flipping two color tables in VRam for every frame update? Or are you changing the color table somehow while the frame is drawn? The download package only contains png and text files in the _Colors Folder, so I wasn't able to verify or understand the test. I need to study the 48 sprite example.

respect to senior_falcon! Incredible nice stuff!

i suggest a fresh download of Classic99 to your Laptop and try it there. you can have multiple instances of Classic99 on different locations on your harddrive. i really like your game in progress.

Hi, which Operating System are you using, 32bit or 64bit? Are you using the same source file for compilation in both emulators? Maybe it is easier to diagnose the compiler problems if you isolate it. Can you create a short example program (max 3 lines) and use it in both emulators? You can also compare the output after each compiler step as senior_falcon recommended once, ti99dir comes in handy for comparing it on PC side.

Hi again! Checked my digital TI library and found out that I have the 2nd edition of Programs for the TI Home Computer in digital format: Currently you feature the First Edition on your site: http://www.pergrem.com/tibooks/misc/programs-for-the-ti-home-computer.zip It's in Pdf format, but size is 463mb and it seems containing color photos instead of text. They should run nice through a OCR. Source of Scan is unknown. Any interest?

Hi Ernie, almost no english book titles in my collection, at least nothing that is missing. When I do research on topics I am always impressed how good university libraries are equipped, maybe the library from the technical university would come in handy. They have all the magazines, books I searched for. Doing a scan via photocam or photocopier there is at least cheaper than buying a book at high prices. BR Klaus

HI! I find this break out of the TI Basic Sandbox very interesting. Could this playground help somehow to dump those cartridges that haven't been dumped yet? I could think of a debugger-like util that runs from TI basic that loads the program that is on the cartridge.

Wow ! Just saw this on Classic99. A big thank you for your invested time, effort and help. Will try to investigate the code and understand what is happening. I have some assembler experience, but not too much yet. I agree that Graphic Mode I is capable of even doing a sidescroller like this and beats bitmap mode by keeping memory requirements low. Today I spent time to rework the Graphics to further avoid the horizontal color limits and get a better look.

Thx for clarifying that RasmusM, here are updated files: The assembler output: map1.asm The Magellan file: map1.zip

This thread is totally interesting and lead me to try out Magellan. I always dreamed about some Mario like Jump'n'run with Horizontal Scrolling on the TI-99. Don't know whether I can program such a thing, but maybe together we can give it a try. First thing I had to learn is that you can prepare multiple Screen Image Tables, but there are limits where you can define the pointer to the one which is active. So you can only activate it at 16 defined spots in VDP, namely at each begin of a 1024 bytes area in the VDP. Either at >0000, >0400, >0800,..., >3C00. So no smooth pointer adaptions to simply get the next row from memory onto the screen Then I read about Graphics Mode I versus Mode II versus Half-Bitmap Mode. Since horizontal scrolling is limiting the colors on a pixel line quite similar in all the modes, I wanna start with the easiest and most familiar mode for me: Graphics Mode I. The color limits are really tricky to overcome when doing smooth scrolling, you can see a few tries on that in my map below. I guess such a game is hard enough to try it without backscrolling. Haven't decided yet whether i shall scroll 1 pixel, 2pixel or 4pixel at once, will decide that later. Of course all would be easier if I can scroll 8 pixels (1char) at once, but I read that such a scrolling looks blocky to those who tried that option. So far I drew 4 screen maps in Magellan in Mode I, made sure about color transitions, and triggered the export for 'Assembler Character Transition Data'. The created assembler source seems to be for the PC, not the TI. Any guidance for the next steps would be more than welcome. Are there any steps within the tools left or am I on my own with the data statements now? Attached is a PNG of the map The assembler output: map1.asm The Magellan file: map1b.zip

There might be differences between cf7+/nanopeb/nanopebVersion2, and even within the same system there might be different firmwares floating around. Maybe we can summarize positive/negative reports on users that tried to update with infos about which "compact flash" device was used, size/manufactor of cf card. I will try it out asap with both of my compact flash devices, although I am already on f18a_v1.5.

This is a highlight video from the Retro Faire 2013 in Vienna this december. Our TI-99 Club got interviewed and we showed off TI-Scramble: The segment is here: 2:16 - 3:00 min You can see a TI-99, equipped with a F18A and running TI-Scramble. Btw: you can also see the Atari Gamepad that we connected to the TI to play games. It's amazing handy.

congrats! it was really good that Ciro won the 99/8 auction. and that michael is taking care of ti 99 emulation on m.e.s.s.

regarding the glitch. experienced it on f18a real hardware. i think i triggered it when accelerating very fast in one direction and during that changed direction to the opposite and accelerated very fast again. so it appeared like i interefered the ongoing up-scrolling with the ship suddenly flying down, forcing it to down-scroll. maybe that makes sense?

if you have an atari joystick adapter for your ti-99, you can get a very handy gamepad: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Atari-2600-Original-Atari-Joypad-Controller-Joypad-gebraucht-/390700500665?pt=DE_PC_Videospiele_Controller&hash=item5af79086b9 I bought one on the last retro faire in Vienna, it works just fine with the WICO Joystick adapter. Reaction time of this Atari gamepad is really good! Could only see advantages over my other joysticks so far! TI Scramble was never so fine to play with!

we showed this game a lot on the retro faire in vienna (www.retroboerse.at) last sunday (8th december 2013) to represent the ti-99 club in austria there. scramble was doing its job very fine thx again. tonight we have our ti-99 club christmas meeting

TI Club Austria is still active and meeting monthly (tonight for example). We will be hosting the European TI Meeting 2014 in Vienna as well. We have gained members by presenting our User Group on Retro Faires and other Vintage Home Computer Events, by getting in contact with people that sell TI 99 stuff on ebay Austria or other Austrian Forums.

One of our Austrian Group actually created a nice replica strip to print out, here is the page to download: http://www.8bit-homecomputermuseum.at/downloads/downloads.html

The game is indeed incredible good looking on my F18A, it plays like an arcade! The only problem I had was getting it to switch to the non F18A mode, via the F key. Either the program crashed afterwards, or didn't switch the mode. I was using tiscramble-1.0.zip for this. F18A has Firmware v1.5 now. This ported game deserves so much credit!

After the update to F18A Firmware v1.5 everything looks awesome now! What a game!

Both XB (silver Mechatronic) and the XB from MicroPal are binary identical to the TI XB v1.1. There was however a gold Mechatronic XB2+ which had more memory and the Apesoft routines build in. For silver Mechatronic XB owners there was also an EPROM upgrade option to XB2+ which included an EPROM chip and a replacement cartridge label to make it gold. I saw it once in some italian or french broschure.

We have a guy in our Austrian ti-99 club who bought a 3d printer lately. If we get a print ready model, we can arrange something for sure. He even said, that a nanoPEB case was one of the reasons to buy it. The tricky part for the CF7+/nanoPEB is to keep the compact flash card and the power on accessable.