mizapf

My father bought our TI console in June 1982; then I went through the manuals, and three months later in September we already got the Extended Basic module. I did not spend too much time with the console BASIC.

Is that something to eat or drink?

a) The SID Master 99 is a PEB card and has no connection to the outside world (aka web). I don't know how the files are typically named on the web, but as usual with MAME, you have to put the files that interest you on a disk image. Then you use the SIDPLAYER; there you can select the files to be played. b) The SID Master 99 is a pluggable card for the Geneve in MAME, but I never tested it thoroughly. It maps to addresses 5800-5836 (even addresses only), incompletely decoded (5800-5FFF). You will certainly have to map the BA page into 4000, but then it should work. c) See the SIDPLAYER software; it has an included help page. Edit: Look up more information here: http://www.dsapsc.com/

The ROM wait state is really silly. The wait states are triggered by the Gate array but created by the PAL; its output (18) is what goes into the READY input of the 9995. One could consider reprogramming the PAL to avoid wait states for accesses to the whole SRAM and EPROM region (C0-FF). Too bad that all its inputs are used, although input 5 (CRU bit 23) has an obscure meaning, so maybe this could be replaced.

Yes, as expected: Only the pages E8-EF have 0 waitstate. If you like you can change the program to test the SRAM pages only. Edit: The pages to be tested are defined in PGLIST BYTE >00,>20,>40,>60,>80,>A0,>BA,>C0,>E0,>E8,>EC,>F0,>FF FF is the stop code. The length is not limited. You could test all the pages from C0-EF, but I think testing C0, E0, E8, and EC as above should suffice.

It is in fact an issue with the console (video) RAM for the installed TI BASIC, as there is no command for checking the available RAM. Extended BASIC adds the SIZE command (which is not available in programs, only on the command line).

Here you are ... including source code. I tried it on my real Geneve. (Actually, I'm not that fast, but I wrote this program already a year ago.) speed.dsk Edit: The program runs some read iterations on different pages; the results are 10ths of seconds. You will see that for a 1 waitstate page you get about 110, while a 0 waitstate page delivers about 100. I adjusted the iteration count so that one wait state delivers 1 second of added runtime.

As you mention that ... yes, I think I remember that accesses to pages C0-E7 cause a wait state to be inserted. That means, regardless of how the decoding of further pages is done, you cannot make the Gate Array believe in that extra 0-ws RAM.

The SID Master 99 is available in MAME since 0.225 if you want to test it (device "sidmaster").

This is one of the cases where you would expect a simple answer, but this is harder to give than it seems. The problem is that your question about "total RAM" implies that you can put two pieces together as one. As said above, the 16 KiB of the console are video RAM and cannot be directly accessed by the CPU. Nevertheless, it serves as data memory or as memory for interpreted languages like BASIC. The 32 KiB memory expansion is, however, addressable by the CPU, and can hold any kind of data or programs. Hence, you have two different RAMTOPs.

How do you select the other SRAM pages? I only found the RAMEN and RAMEN-X outputs on the Gate array in the schematics; for that reason I limited the SRAM expansion in the emulation to 32K.

When I wrote the emulation I also heard of SID Blaster, but after some research I found a piece of hardware of that name that is intended to connect a SID chip via USB to a PC (https://github.com/stg/SIDBlaster-USB). So I thought this was an unintended mix up of names and took the name "SID master 99" for the emulation in MAME. I hope I don't have to rename it again.

The SIDBLASTER is officially named "SID Master 99", according to its manual. (Or is it something else?)

OK, then H11 was not a bad choice if you wanted both floppy and hard disk. I remember that I had some floppy drive issues with the HFDC back in those times, so I used a separate floppy controller. Interesting to see that people could wish to remove the HD support.

Is there a list of changes for the DSR variants?

This is seriously spooky. Already talked with Mr. Shyamalan about a script? What I meant was that the effect from the screenshot is only caused by a redefinition of the space character; no other characters are affected. I don't know, of course, how this could have happened. Edit: Right now, I'm watching "It" (2017) on TV.

As it seems to me, it suffices if the space character is redefined with pixels at its right edge.

Only the Myarc floppy controllers (DDCC1, HFDC) contain a directory list routine (CALL DIR); for normal BASIC/Extended BASIC there is no such command. The directory on a TI file system is a pseudo file with data sets; you have to open it, read each record, and print it in a suitable way on the screen. Yes, this sounds cumbersome, and the "normal user" in TI's view of those days had a cassette recorder.

The times are slightly higher in MAME, but I can confirm this result (728 vs. 811).

If someone intends to edit the file, please use LibreOffice and do not import the file in MS Word. The 99% compatibility leaves a 1% that sometimes spoils the layout beyond repair. I may also do a review of the resulting file if desired.

Here it is (LibreOffice writer format). MYARC HFDC Manual 4th edition.odt

I just got a mail from Jesse who asked about the SOB. As he said, the GROM dumps are 8K in size; this is, in fact, a hard showstopper for the emulation, as I emulate GROMs (not a simulation) of them, and those are limited to 6K. To make that work, I would need to add this SOB as a specifically emulated piece of hardware. This is similar to the cartridges where we have "standard" type cartridges and "gromemu" cartridges.

Well, then ... I'd recommend to use the dumped GROMs with the driver ti99_4ev, using the process as described above. The ti99_4ev driver looks for ROM dumps named as follows: 994a_grom0.u500 994ev_grom1.u501 994a_grom2.u502 994a_rom_hb.u610 994a_rom_lb.u611 It will certainly complain about mismatched CRC and SHA1, but this can be ignored. Note that we don't use a special GROM 0 but a modified GROM 1 (ever since, there has not been any special GROM 0 version in the set of ROM dumps).

But since the TI-99/4A console emulation does not contain a 9958, I guess it does not really make sense to use those GROMs there.

Ah, I did not notice that TIM and SOB. What does it mean?