aftyde
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Posts posted by aftyde
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Easier for me to list the things I use on my daily driver. It's an actual production machine - as in, I have been using this system for over 30 years to keep track of a parts inventory and it gets used daily.
- TIPI in PEB - interesting, but not all that useful. It does a poor job of emulating real storage (my opinion). Basically, if it doesn't work well with TI-BASE or DM2k it's not helpful. To be fair, I have not put the time into learning this as well as I should.
- HxC - 2 2880 sector diskette images currently host my database. Sadly, TI-BASE seems to only like diskettes for this. Going with HxC has made backups super simple and disk corruptions are a thing of the past. Presently using the Lotharek drives - expensive, but very high quality. DSK1 and DSK2 are SD cards, DSK3 is a DSDD Teac drive I keep for media compatibility. These are connected to a MyARC DDCC-1 with the 80 track DSDD ROM upgrade.
- WHT SCSI - connected to a Syquest SQ200 drive. This is where TI-BASE lives, and all my apps, programs and data. I love listening to it do it's thing.
- HDX - HDX1. maps to a disk on my SAN device where I have a stripped down embedded Win VM running TI99Hdx. (USB to Serial plugged into back of SAN, connected by a fairly long serial cable to the TI RS-232 card with HDX mod) This hosts all my TI stuff and is where I back up the WHT SCSI drive. Basically. HDX1. is my TI99 directory on my SAN device - solid as a rock in terms of dependability and function.
- P-GRAM+ - with clock. Currently loaded with RXB, Editor Assember and a few other commonly used cart images. They appear in a menu on powerup. I could easily lose this and use the FinalGROM - but there is something nostalgic about running old hardware that was considered cool - and it's neat to be able to dump a cart to disk though I haven't done that in a while. The clock is also supported by a lot of old software.
I'm guessing there is a way where I can use the TIPI to replace the HDX. Basically, mount my SAN drive on the PI and map a disk to it. Use it as a clock somehow. I have been considering this. But I use DM2K and experience all sorts of problems using disks and files on the TIPI. Maybe there is something I am doing wrong - perhaps permissions on the PI or SAN. Have not yet broken the code.
Otherwise, all the Horizon RAM cards I have (most of them broken), along with other vintage TI gadgets such as the cart switcher, printer interfaces, physical carts - they'll rumble around in my desk for a while until a send them off to better homes on eBay...
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9 hours ago, Flottmann1 said:
What is this thing???
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Sign me up for 2 assembled 8mb boards - my 32K cards need to go back into storage and this looks like much more fun!
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What sort of disk controller is in this PEB??? https://www.ebay.com/itm/Texas-Instruments-TI-99-4A-Computer-Expansion-System-PHP1200-with-Modules/184196575647
Anyone recognize?
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Sitting here at Narita now... didn't get a chance to visit Akihabara on this trip but I do make it to Japan about once every six weeks. Do you recall the location of the vintage shops? (realize nearly impossible ask) Usually I just hit Yodabashi Camera for parts - or the complex of stalls behind the train station.
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16 hours ago, mizapf said:
The 32k internal 16bit expansion is actually emulated in MAME. I just changed the default to the unexpanded console. The internal expansion can be selected in the OSD.
I am sorry if my above posting sounded somewhat terse, but this is easily explained: I am sitting in a hotel in the Alps for a week of skiing, and I have only my tablet here. It is truly a pain to type longer texts on a touch screen. So @aftyde, I hope you did not understand it wrong. Questions are always welcome.
Argh... and this text is already difficult enough to type. Hell must be some place where they take away your keyboard and force you to do debugging on a smartphone.
LOL - no worries. I understand the requirement to pin the clock speed and get the predictable response just right - games would be unplayable and so forth. At the moment - it seems like MAME might be able to give me some big storage options to experiment with. I run a very large TI-BASE database - and am pushing the limits of what I can do with my physical Myarc DDCC w 80 track ROM - 2880 sectors at a minimum is what I need these days to run the whole system.
So ideally - I'm looking for tools that can support big storage images - and emulation options so I can carry the system around with me.
Enjoy the slopes!
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17 hours ago, Tursi said:
I know standard carts can be packaged up for MAME, many have done so. Classic99 doesn't have a special cart "format", it just reads raw memory dumps, so for MAME you just need to produce the information file it requires.
I'm curious why Classic99 can't run TI-BASE, though - what issue are you hitting? I'd like to fix it.
Hi Tursi, it always boils down to diskette access. However, I just downloaded the latest Classic99 and tried it with the DSK1 and DSK2 images I created for MAME and it works!
(or appears to be working) So for the moment - I am going to switch this over to Classic99 and experiment a bit more. (as I much prefer Classic99) Could be the much smaller disk images I am testing with.
DSK1 and DSK2 are double sided, 40 track, 9 sec per track, single density 720 sectors total. OK for a very small subset of the data I need on hand.
In the past - I would get device access errors or weirdness with anything bigger - as I recall. It would help to know what formats of disk image Classic99 supports? DSDD 40 or 80, 1440??? Hard disk image? CF7 image?
Have been using Fred K's Ti99Dir to make images...
Ideally - I'm looking for a minimum of 2880 sectors (DSDD 80 track, 18 sectors) of space on a diskette as TI-BASE seems unable to work when I point it as HDX, SDS or some other large capacity device.
The joy of running ancient software!
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Hi Everyone,
Happy to report that I now have a MAME 0.219 going, as a TI-99/4 - and remarkably it runs TI-BASE properly. It's the only emulator that has been able to do this and I've tried them all. So, now that I have it running I'm hoping the team can help me with some questions.
1. Is there any way to set the clock speed of the machine to run faster than 3MHz?
2. Has anyone created an XB 2.7 Suite all in one cart for it? (any way to extract such a cart from Classic99) Can I steal cart .bin files, zip them up and use them?
3. What about access to FIAD or something of that nature?
4. Is the HW that I see at https://www.ninerpedia.org/wiki/MAME_TI_emulation_usage all there is?
Sorry for the many questions. I have been running my large TI physical system in production as a DB machine for 36 years... exciting to finally be getting serious about emulating it!
Thank you, Arthur...
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Hey Team, hoping for a pointer on accessing DSDD drives on mame. The tifdc option seems to work but I get unknown slot option trying to use hdfc
Are there roms somewhere that I don't have???
never mind.... ugh... LOL
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50 minutes ago, HOME AUTOMATION said:
Drag 'n drop a text file onto the Win994a.exe icon, to reset it's configuration.
This works when Win994a cannot find a file on startup.
OMFG!!!
Thank you!!!
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Hi All, anyone have luck getting this to run. Seems a recent Win upgrade broke it. Has anyone figured out how to make it run? I've tried everything I can think of in terms of compatibility settings.
Cheers, Arthur...
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Would ARC or a similar tool be able to compress a dir structure to a single file on a device?
Sent from my EVR-L29 using Tapatalk -
5 hours ago, aftyde said:
Do not know jedi commander, will try to locate and check it out. Setting CRU might cause issues with other cards. It's a packed PEB.
Sent from my EVR-L29 using Tapatalk
Yes, DM2K will see TIPI. but it's a mess. Files don't display properly. Can't copy, delete, mkdir - nothing really works as you would expect. While I understand the TIPI isn't designed as a file storage device - being able to back up TI hard disks to it would be excellent. Or better, host my network based TI home directory on it. (which I currently access via. HDX)
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Wow! Stop looking for a few months and miracles happen. FC is pretty damn impressive. Looking for wildcard support or an xcopy command... or some way to create one. Or perhaps Fred can enhance the CRU.DEVx.PATH magic into DM2K. I was very pleased by the ability to CD directly into a directory whether it be diskette, ram disk, hard disk, or HDX and execute software.
Matt - really awesome. Thank you!!!
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Do not know jedi commander, will try to locate and check it out. Setting CRU might cause issues with other cards. It's a packed PEB.You need to use DSK4 to write to it with dm2k but since dm2k wasn't designed to access tipi you may have issues. The cru may need to be set to 1000 for this to work.
Better yet Use jedi commander to copy to it which works with TIPI. As it was designed to.
Sent from my LM-G820 using Tapatalk
Sent from my EVR-L29 using Tapatalk
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Hi All,
New to the TIPI - meaning, I have a PEB attached version and love it. However, I do not use it to it's fullest potential yet. However, I understand you can store stuff on it. I have yet to figure out how to mount a directory on it as a destination I can write to with DM2K.
Ideally, I'd like to dump my SCSI hard disk to it as a backup.
Anyone use a TIPI in this manner? Any suggestions?
Thank you, Arthur...
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works fine here
did you start tiprint from within hdx?
click options, start tiprint
tiprint needs to be hooked to the hdx line not the serial port, starting it there works
Will give it a shot!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
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8.1a and the 2004 version of print. If you could check your settings and let me know what they are, that would help.
I would consider reloading the DSR except the HDX server is receiving the print data on the Windows machine as it did before. Although, never hurts to be sure.
It’s also a Win 10 machine, so maybe there is some IPC library that has changed to the point where this no longer works on modern machines. Settings and a screen shot of what I should expect to see in ti99print would also be a big help since I don’t know what normal and working looks like.
Really appreciate the ideas!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
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What program are you printing from? BASIC, WRITER, etc?
Fails from TI Basic, and TI-Base. I had it working with TI-Base years ago. Can't imagine what I am doing wrong. HDX is clearly receiving the data. Just not passing it along to ti99print.
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Hi All,
Quick question. I have the HDX1 serial card mod. All works great. Sudden need to print from the TI... So, pointed the HDX server software at the directory where ti99print resides and gave it a whirl. After an hour, still can't seem to figure it out. Can anyone offer some tips on how to configure and set it up. The HDX docs say it will just work through a software connection to ti99print, and I can see the records being written to <PRINT> on the HDX server app when I print. But nothing appears in the ti99print window.
Basically... out of ideas on how to troubleshoot the thing.
ti99print config is set to serial line 3 and GEEN (whatever that means)
Any ideas?
Cheers, Arthur...
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The other thread indicated it was resolved. Can we share the resolution?
-M@
Yes, I watched via. top on the PI through an SSH connection after pressing "U" (from b19, which is the image on your webpage), git did it's thing... but the system was left in a non working (hung) state. Executing a CALL TIPI would just lock the sys with the card LED on. Working with Greg we checked the setup - all good. Seemed to need the post_update script to be run. I did not see that happen via. top on the initial upgrade.
When we ran that, the system came up with the new update. So all good. A valuable learning experience.
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Best practices files question... I have a NAS device with my TI99 home directory on it. It's basically a backup of WDS1. which is my SQ200 200MB hard disk on a WHTech SCSI card.
HDX1 is mapped to this via HDX mod on RS232 card talking to win client pointed at that share.
All the file show up OK... I can run anything off it. I usually run large packages like TI-BASE. So executing HDX1.TIB.TIBASEW will run the DB system off HDX. (same is true of WDS1.)
I have tried lots of ways to copy a directory to the PI, such that I could try running it off the PI (TIPI.TIB.TIBASEW)
However, whenever I go into DM2K to look at the files, all the file names are munged.
Have tried straight copy, DM2K, Ti99Dir - nothing works. Here are two pics, here is what it looks like on the TIPI (file names munged), and here is what is is supposed to look like (on HDX - which works)
Would value any ideas? -
Hi Everyone, and Greg - many thanks! All I needed to do was run the post update script and things came back - and the new upgrade was in. Much appreciated!
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Nope, I did ssh into the PI and expand the boot drive. Should I not do that?
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TIPI Usage and Support
in TI-99/4A Computers
Posted
Had some problems today with the TIPI locking up while accessing DSK1. Red LED would stay on - and the TI-BASE app locks up. Complete system reboot required. After this happened three times in a row, I pulled everything apart and cleaned the edge connectors with alcohol pads - TI, Speech, Firehose - unseated all the PEB cards and cleaned all edge connectors.
Good to go!