[Weather thread]

We never get this shit in the North East England UK, but tonight :-

 

 

Unseasonably warm weather for May as well, were all going to die I tells yer.

[F18A Karts demo]

Does this only work with JS99er or is there a way to get it working in Classic99?

[Update on The Sparkdrummer]

Sorry for your loss, RIP Sparkdrummer.

[Have you seen this video?]

Undocumented feature?  Thought it was already a known feature of MSX Turbo R models that could be switched via an MSX Dos command.

[WTF?]

3 hours ago, Retrospect said:

It's been created using senior falcon's "makecartG" utility.  I think it works on Final Grom?  I would have attempted an RPK but I just cannot get my head around the layout file and what things are meant to be in there.    I will keep trying that though! 

Edit:  I just went onto my folders to get you the fiad file to put it into a DSK image that I knew would run under MAME and it appears i've binned the source, binned all my fiads and emptied the bin earlier during a cleanup.  I should never do this but then again I can't stand "hoarding" on my pc!   Sorry about that.  

Here you go. 

JOE.dsk

[Making a Will o' Wisp in bitmap mode]

Keep going, this is excellent!

 

What is the background story and the object of the game?

[Cosmic Shootout]

It's really addictive, be nice if it had a high score table as it will get quite competitive.

[Death Forest]

2 hours ago, Retrospect said:

Made more progress.  It's just about ready now , just needs a manual creating for it and it's good to go.  I thought a month because I thought I might put it down again like I have lots of other projects but I kept going and had a load of spare time yesterday to get this done.  

 

Now when we shoot all the enemies we go to an end of level boss which is a bouncing ball that shoots at the player.  In this stage the player can only move left and right at the bottom of the screen, space invaders style.  The ball itself can kill the player as can the balls' missiles.  I suppose this is the Bouncing Boss.

 

Enemy missiles start out slower at the beginning, but with each level passed,  the missile gets faster (up to a point).  The same for the speed of the bouncing boss.

 

 

 

[airsharksoftware.com]

Going from his ebay listing it looks like you send him payment via paypal then he sends you a download link to your email, I don't know if he's actually done the type-in's himself from magazine listings or not but there is stuff I've never seen anywhere else before.  I'm just interested in getting them into the new Gamebase of which incidentally I've never made a penny from. 

[airsharksoftware.com]

Is this anyone on here?  

 

Just wondering how the paypal thing works to buy the 150 Ti99/4a type in games (A few of them are not in the Gamebase)

 

As show here - https://www.youtube.com/@TheAirshark/search?query=TI99

[Mario Bros.]

2 hours ago, retrodroid said:

Opinions are like *ssholes, everybody has one! 

Chomp it up macboy

 

[Mario Bros.]

Apple Macs - over priced overrated stylised crap.

[Running a Basic program]

1 hour ago, Tursi said:

Actually, you did say Gamebase, right? For Classic99, you could just include a keyboard line in the INI that includes "RUN".

 

I am not sure how you are loading it, so I can't provide a customized example, but this INI would load and RUN a TI BASIC program from disk:

 

[mikes28]
name=Hello World BASIC
rom0=K|0|0|nn1OLD DSK0.HELLOWORLD\nRUN\n

 

"K" indicates to load the data to the keyboard buffer (which is a Classic99 thing, not a TI-99 thing). The 0's are ignored but the line won't be parsed without a load address and length. The two 'n's are to get off the title page -- any key will do but I specifically use a non-digit because sometimes the first character isn't needed. (There's a dummy call to KSCAN in the ROMs but sometimes the paste function misses it.) The '1' selects TI BASIC. The "OLD DSK0.HELLOWORLD" loads the program from DSK0 (and the "\n" forces Enter to be pressed). Then the "RUN\n" works the same way. Since it runs through calls to the keyboard scanner it will wait as long as needed for the load to complete.

 

Yeah already do this with the Classic99 emulator but need the solution for the MAME option.

[Powertran Cortex Basic Programs]

1 hour ago, Stuart said:

To be honest, you've possibly already found pretty much everything there is. I've got a few more bits and pieces than are on my website but they are not wildly exciting. There are some listings in the user group newsletter - presumably you've found those already.

 

Link?

[Powertran Cortex Basic Programs]

Does anyone have any or know of an online resource containing Cortex Basic programs?

 

Apart from the resources at http://powertrancortex.com/ and http://www.stuartconner.me.uk/ti/ti.htm I seem to be hitting a wall.

[Running a Basic program]

"A Ti Basic program walked into a bar .."

[Running a Basic program]

10 hours ago, senior_falcon said:

In theory, it would not be to hard to modify TI BASIC so that after OLD CS1 or OLD DSK1.PROGRAM, the interpreter would RUN the program instead of returning to the command line. But you would need to modify the BASIC interpreter. That can be done pretty easily in classic99, at least temporarily, but a real TI99 would need a revised grom chip, and it's hard to picture anyone wanting to do that.

There has been some talk about a new minimemory cartridge, and for that or EZ basic,  you might add a CALL RUN which could work like so: CALL RUN("CS1") or CALL RUN("DSK1.PROGRAM").

But I am not really sure that would do what you want.

As long as it runs a Ti Basic program at the correct speed and is 100% compatible then yes that would do.

[Running a Basic program]

2 hours ago, Tursi said:

It would be a crapton of work, but you could use Classic99 to save the TI BASIC program as a loader cartridge after you type RUN (if it has a nice title page, that's also a good place to save it, but you'd have to decide program by program where to catch it). 

 

This would give you a 16k ROM cart that loads the BASIC program to RAM and continues from whatever point you saved it at - sort of a save state. Since it's an actual cartridge, it works on any emulator and even real hardware.

 

Unfortunately that would also mean a ton of work given the amount of basic programs in the Gamebase, looks like it's sticking with manual input to run.

 

PS.  Was that a Metric or Imperial Crapton? 

[Running a Basic program]

On 1/28/2024 at 9:13 PM, OLD CS1 said:

In regular old TI BASIC, probably not without some level of trickery.  TI BASIC does not accommodate chaining commands, and offers no keyboard buffer.

I wonder if it's possible to hack the basic rom to use chained commands or use a keyboard buffer?  Or add RUN"DSK.BLAHBLAH" functionality as in extended basic.  I know they can be ran in RXB but that's speeding things up.

 

The reason I ask is because I want to automatically run a basic program from disk after it is loaded in the Gamebase, the old solution was to count a given amount of seconds per program in the script but that was unreliable so got dropped in favour of letting the user type "RUN" after the load.

[Running a Basic program]

Is there a way to load and start a Basic program with a one-liner?

[French Books Scanned]

On 1/23/2024 at 10:24 AM, Retrospect said:

Nice one Ciro,  thanks for these .... I might type a few of these in.  I'll let you know which ones if I do 

It would be nice to see some more old programs brought to life.

[Ghostbusters - Development Diary]

On 1/21/2024 at 10:34 AM, TheMole said:

Here's a new release candidate, I believe it fixes the bug originally reported by @OLD CS1 where the game got stuck after getting slimed by a ghost when the ghosts timer ran out after sliming the player, but before having dissapeared off the screen.

 

I've spent quite some time playing it on both real hardware as well as in different emulators and am not seeing any other game breaking bugs, so with a bit of luck, this can be considered the final release.

 

ghostbusters8.bin 512 kB · 23 downloads ghostbusters.rpk 80.17 kB · 8 downloads

The .bin file freezes Classic99 for me but the .rpk works fine in MAME.

[Inufuto Japanese games!]

14 minutes ago, mizapf said:

Use "gromemu" as PCB type.

Thanks Michael, I could really use a tutorial on rpk layout.xml setup for the cart types and a way of identifying the cart image files.

[Inufuto Japanese games!]

Does anyone have a working .rpk for Impetus?  Tried getting it working in MAME with the following setup layout.xml but just get a messed up screen :-

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<romset version="1.0">
   <resources>
      <rom id="romimage" file="impetus_8.bin"/>
   </resources>
   <configuration>
       <pcb type="paged378">
          <socket id="rom_socket" uses="romimage"/>
       </pcb>
   </configuration>
</romset>
 

[New Tape game WAV's]

I copied the spudz.dat file over to the disk image and converted it to PROGRAM with Ti99Dir, the game runs in Ti Basic but to run from disk it must be copied over to minimem (on real iron or MAME) or use Classic99 and CALL FILES(0)