I am the author. I really didn't expect it to generate much interest. I wrote it primarily for the learning experience (which is why it has more bugs and is not a port of a better emulation engine like MESS which would probably have been more productive).
I totally agree that the joystick sucks. I'm not much of a UI designer and didn't have any great ideas how to squeeze it in there. Maybe a toggle to hide the keyboard and use the whole bottom half for a joystick image?
It should work with USB and BT keyboards. The idea was that one could use a cheap Android TV stick and plug it into a TV (that's also partially why it goes full-screen when rotated to landscape mode as that's how it would display on a TV).
The cartridges were fixed because they usually come in multiple files so the user interface to load them was more work and they can include functionality that's more than just data.
I asked Texas Instruments for permission to distribute the ROMs and they were gracious enough to give me permission for any TI-99 software they have copyright to so if there are specific TI carts that people are interested in, that would be pretty easy to add.
Disk emulation is pretty incomplete (and buggy) as it was thrown in there last. I'll have to do more research on the file formats for disks and ROMs. I chose DSK images because they were simplest.
All that said, the code is also available and while it is rather messy (too much coupling between pieces that should be separate), it should be relatively straightforward to find the relevant code and improve it and I'd gladly accept code changes and roll a new app for the Play Store. Some of the more interesting features (in my opinion) that might offset some of the bugs and limitations are in the debugger which can be accessed with telnet on port 1234. For example, one thing that wasn't mentioned in the documentation is that the debugger embeds a Lua interpreter and hooks for things like memory accesses and branches, which, with some improvements, might be useful to people developing new software for the system.
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TI-99 Emulator on Android
in TI-99/4A Computers
Posted
I am the author. I really didn't expect it to generate much interest. I wrote it primarily for the learning experience (which is why it has more bugs and is not a port of a better emulation engine like MESS which would probably have been more productive).
I totally agree that the joystick sucks. I'm not much of a UI designer and didn't have any great ideas how to squeeze it in there. Maybe a toggle to hide the keyboard and use the whole bottom half for a joystick image?
It should work with USB and BT keyboards. The idea was that one could use a cheap Android TV stick and plug it into a TV (that's also partially why it goes full-screen when rotated to landscape mode as that's how it would display on a TV).
The cartridges were fixed because they usually come in multiple files so the user interface to load them was more work and they can include functionality that's more than just data.
I asked Texas Instruments for permission to distribute the ROMs and they were gracious enough to give me permission for any TI-99 software they have copyright to so if there are specific TI carts that people are interested in, that would be pretty easy to add.
Disk emulation is pretty incomplete (and buggy) as it was thrown in there last. I'll have to do more research on the file formats for disks and ROMs. I chose DSK images because they were simplest.
All that said, the code is also available and while it is rather messy (too much coupling between pieces that should be separate), it should be relatively straightforward to find the relevant code and improve it and I'd gladly accept code changes and roll a new app for the Play Store. Some of the more interesting features (in my opinion) that might offset some of the bugs and limitations are in the debugger which can be accessed with telnet on port 1234. For example, one thing that wasn't mentioned in the documentation is that the debugger embeds a Lua interpreter and hooks for things like memory accesses and branches, which, with some improvements, might be useful to people developing new software for the system.