ralphb

Yes, I still offer carts and parts. For cases, though, you'll have to contact c0d3m4st4 or modify a Romox shell (perfect fit) or standard shell (lesser fit). Note that you can also build your own cart from scratch, as everything but the case is in the repository.

Thanks!

Duh, thanks! BTW, is your Speecoder available somewhere right now, as your home page is under maintenance?

I'm trying to say some things with CALL SAY in XB, but it's not working at it should. For example, CALL SAY("READY TO START") just spells out READY and continues with "TO START". CALL SAY in conjunction with CALL SPGET CALL SPGET("READY TO START", R$) CALL SAY(,R$) just says "uh-oh" (both on real iron). READY TO START is listed as an available word in the XB manual. Is this a mistake, or do I need to specify that phrase differently? (I know there's Text-To-Speech, but I probably need the output sooner than I learned that tool.)

Awesome! So consumer prices would be like + 14% tax + 30% markup?

There are lots of magazine scans on WHTech, so in Compute! 2/83 I found an ad with prices for all components:

Yes, confirmed. In Spring 1984, though, they didn't offer any original TI hardware at all, except for (you guessed it) joysticks and cassette cables.

Thanks Michael, that's a blast from the past! Are the RADIX ads also from 83? The cheaper one looks identical to my TI Revue 3/84 I had been looking at, so the other one seems more accurate. That would make it a 475,- console with a 1900,- PEB (containing standard floppy drive and 32K). The Triton catalog is also a great suggestion -- thanks!

Does anyone have an old advertisement or catalog at hand that lists prices for the TI 99, the PEB with one floppy, the 32K, and maybe even the Speech Synth back in the day? I'm interested in the prices before the curtain fell, maybe first half of 1983. Bonus points for German prices. (I perused the magazines I have, but all are from 1984 and onward, have very few ads for the TI, and none list the TI 99 console itself.)

It'll show GAME A and GAME B. If you also push the FlashROM reset button, you'll see FLASHROM 99 again.

That's not entirely correct, as one file equals one program may have several entries, just like Disk Manager 2 (that's not a FlashROM title, but I can't think of any right away). If you select any of those entries you will not get the Disk Manager 2 cart menu, but the selected entry will start right away.

Yes, the FlashROM takes all images "as is" of any size up to 32K. You could load a 4K image, or 513 Byte image ... The FlashROM doesn't care about size, it loads images into RAM just as they come. But as there is only 32K of RAM, BIN files larger than 32K are skipped when scanning. And images must not be inverted. There's no logic required for handling different sizes, with one exception: if you have an 16K image (like Pac-Man) that uses an unconventional bank switch value (like >6AAA instead of >6002), then banks 2 and 3 might be selected instead of the intended 0 and 1. Thus, the FlashROM mirrors small images into unused banks. In the case of Pac-Man, you have two copies running from all banks. For 8K images, you have 4 copies. The "logic" of different sizes is handled by the bank switching circuit, which is the same one as the ones on the Multicarts.

Finally I had some time to work on the FlashROM again (other than soldering carts, anyway ), so I wanted to share my latest FlashROM hack that can run simple GROM images. The good news is this: https://youtu.be/M2-lvFyfoyo But as you can see from the picture of the hacked cart, the bad news is that I cannot accommodate ROM data together with the GROM data, making this hack of limited use. The main reason is the 541 IC for the data bus. The 541 only permits data to pass from the cart to the TI 99, but not vice versa. Consequently, I cannot read GROM addresses written to >9C02. (Took me several days to realize this, duh!) And unfortunately, the bidirectional 245 is not a drop-in replacement, so ROM+GROM images need a new design. Besides, as the 8515 had only one unused pin, I had to re-purpose the image selection lines, so you can't have more than one image per SD card. The 8515 on the hacked cart reads GROM data directly from the SD card in 256 Byte chunks and stores them in an internal buffer. If a GROM address outside this buffer is requested (and this happens quite often), a new chunk is read from the SD card. As before, the LED lights whenever the SD card is accessed. I'm actually surprised that this works rather well in my test, but performance will drop as soon as you won't use a pristine SD card. So, this means that a FlashGROM is not a simple extension of the FlashROM, but will require a re-design. Maybe I'll find some time later this year to start working on it.

But at least the Arduinos are compatible with TTL. I started the FlashROM with an Arduino Mega (the board, not just the microcontroller).

For reasons I don't quite understand the Wikipedia page for the TI 99/4A has an entire paragraph titled "Cult following".

Err, this just occurred to me: if you change the extension of your backup and scratch files to something different, like .a99x, IDEA shouldn't index those files any more.

I have no idea! AFAIK, that ET game is indeed a prototype, as are some others. Ksarul would know, or schmitzi could look it up in his lists. But most are conversions from disk games (EA5), or GROM conversions, the latter being totally bewildering to me -- I didn't even know you could that, and automatically to boot! Many games I've never heard of. I'm really looking forward to a free, rainy day that allows me to try out every single game in this thread!

That script won't work for programs that use addresses with non-zero upper bits to switch banks, e.g. Pac-Man. You need to repeat the image until it is 512K in size (or whatever the max size for the 37x used is). There's a Python script that does this in the FlashROM GitHub: https://github.com/endlos99/flashrom99/blob/master/lib/mklcart.py : . > mklcart.py something.bin . yields something.rpk.

I know what you're talking about, this happens to me as well sometimes. But more often, it's a feature, so I guess that's why it's the default for IDEA. I'm not sure I can realize your proposal, since you also want to jump back from an included file. This implies that you have multiple "projects" at a time, and you keep switching back and forth between them, and the file-to-project associations keeps changing as you edit files. But I'll have a go at it later in August, after I finished up that other business and after my vacation. Is it just for navigation, or also renaming? (Can't remember top of my head if you can separate those, though.)

Well, I totally agree. My statement doesn't really make sense, but I guess I mentally imagined a TI that loads a program once and runs that for hours, versus a PC with a hard disk running lots of different programs.

No, all disk controllers (and TIIT) handle fragmentation just fine and can use the entire disk. And floppy disk fragmentation isn't as performance-degrading as it was for hard disks with FAT, either. It's just an observation for TIDir (which I don't use myself, because Windows).

Don't care? That means if I delete just one file on a disk, I wouldn't be able to use all the free sectors on that disk, no? But maybe he just does it differently. xdm99, for example, just completely defragments the disk whenever it writes to it, so all files are always unfragmented, but you still can use the full capacity.

Here's a Chinese seller who offers a "TI 99 Kit" of ICs: http://www.ebay.com/itm/152157205202 There's a 9900 in there, and two 9901, a 9938 instead if a 9918 ... do the other ICs make any kind of sense for a TI 99? There's also a "9958 Video Kit": http://www.ebay.com/itm/161522942511 What could you possible build out of this kit, i.e., what was the model for that collection?

That's one blip per second. No SD card or bad SD card or bad filesystem (most likely).

You could establish a series of writes that would introduce listening mode; the longer the series, the lower the probability of accidentally triggering it by bank selection. This modification would allow larger images, to some extend, but it wouldn't be common for the FlashROM at this point. Are you interested in this modification? I guess I could do a custom version ... eventually.