JB

A USB adapter would actually be fairly complex. USB isn't a pretty standard, and requires a significant amount of processing power. Adding to the fun, the USB gamepad standard doesn't have an official layout. But an adapter to use Super Nintendo or Genesis controllers unmolested wouldn't be near as difficult. Standard Genesis pads are pretty simple, and the four buttons available(A,B,C,Start) are already a good chunk of the TI controller port's capabilities(eight of ten signals). The "6-button" controller is significantly more complex, and actually exceeds the TI controller port's capabilities by two buttons(mode and start are the most logical buttons to ignore). Nintendo pads are a different kind of simple, but still simple. As a bonus, Super Nintendo controllers aren't actually any harder to read than Nintendo pads(you pull 16 bits out of the pad instead of . As with the Sega 6-button controllers, the Super Nintendo offers two more buttons than we can easily use. Gotta get power from somewhere else, as the TI joystick port isn't really designed as a power source. Hmmmm... I have an Arduino just gathering dust, and this is well within the device's capabilities. Not making any promises, but I might take a shot at this.

Not gonna lie, I'd watch pro calvinball.

Calvinball.

Been done in the past with the 9938. It is almost trivial. Gotta solder one new wire from the console to the video card, and that's the only thing that keeps it from being "plug&play".

Speed isn't going to be derived from the AC frequency, as it isn't stable enough or fast enough(and power is converted to DC before it hits the logic board). The 4a has an internal clock crystal for timing. The traditional speed difference between America and Europe is from the slower TV frame rate, but in the modern era, european TVs can take the faster american inputs and now 60 Hz rules the world.

I like this idea.

First guess is the Personal Record Keeping cartridge.

Eh? My impression was that the C65 was backwards-compatible hardware, with the new chips being extensions of the C64 chips. Software emulation seems... implausible for the early 90s on a platform where everything had direct hardware access. The difference between the C64 and 99/4a scenes is one of scale. We have a small number of very passionate people, they have a huge number of people at multiple passion levels. Unfortunately, scale of the community has a lot of impact on what sort of projects are going to go places. Personally, I think an FPGA 99/8 with an F18a replacing the 9918a would be pretty rad. But I know nothing about programming FPGAs. On the other hand, I know enough about business that I doubt a 99/8 reproduction would ever recoup the costs of setting up case molds. The Mega65 is highly likely to recoup all its costs just because the market is so much larger. And garnering positive press is easier. You send an e-mail to Gizmodo or Kotaku or whoever is cool these days announcing that you're making a new, more powerful C64, you're front-page news and relinked a million times before the day is out. If instead you announce that you're making a new, more powerful TI 99/4a, they click delete while wondering why anyone would bother announcing a new calculator.

I get the impression the Geneve also suffered another issue the C-128 had: It was more like two computers in one box than it was an upgraded version of the older computer. Quite literally in the 128's case. You can't easily make software that runs nicely on the newer system and gracefully downgrades itself on the older one, in the way you can on an IBM-compatible or a GameBoy Color. You can't choose to make Geneve or 128 software that degrades gracefully on a 4a or a C64. The 99/8 was (more or less) just a faster 4a with more RAM, so there was a lot of potential for software sharing. Just as a lazy example, a TI-Writer II with larger(or even multi-)file support on a 99/8 that ALSO ran on a 99/4a by dialing back to TI-Writer I file behaviors, while still benefiting from any other changes. You can't really do that with a C128 or a Geneve, because the new computer behaves so differently outside of compatibility mode. . ON THE OTHER HAND, the 99/8's graphics capabilities would have been a serious sore spot. The 9918a was looking pretty dated, and my impression is that the 9118 didn't actually bring anything new to the table.

The Mega65 was mentioned earlier in the thread, and they had a similar problem. They changed the expansion bus to be compatible with the wide array of C64 accessories instead of the nonexistent C65 accessories. We could do the same. Or include the 99/8 connector on the back and the 99/4 connector on the side.Assuming the system architecture isn't fundamentally incompatible with existing peripherals, of course.

With enough Krylon, anything is possible.

My Tipi is in a P-box, actually. I just love the look of that case, and could easily see a standalone Pi in it. Not that I'd be above using a Dremel to add a cable slot if it came to that.

Where'd you get that Pi case? It is fantastic, and I would love one.

I would figure out what is in the boxes and boxes of floppies I have sitting here.

I used to have a 4000E, I think it was. Had a trackball that clipped on the side. It died years ago. I still have an LT 286. Though the hard disk crashed when I booted it last. Less fun than a 486 even when it is working. But it looks cooler.

Bounty Bob buried ET in New Mexico! Don't believe the news!

Ah. I thought the currently-available ones were like the vintage one I have, which is just wires.

Use the existing Atari-TI adapters with a couple gender-benders to reverse the plugs?

Unless you want something luxuriously extravagant like stereo sound.

Coincidence... or CONSPIRACY?

DVI-I carries VGA and (basically) HDMI signals. It is a five-dollar adapter to connect it to either. It seems like the optimum configuration, as it gets an end-run around the HDMI licensing mess AND preserves VGA output possibility. Only thing missing is sound.

I admit to being curious how much else the Pi can do at once before it stops being responsive enough for Tipi use. IRC client? Music player? X server? Doom?

Yeah, I rather like having DVI-I as an output. DVI-D isn't terrible either, though I admit that "maybe VGA" made my eyes light up.

That's hardly fair.They also slapped the word APPLE on it.

VHS or Beta?