JB

As I understand things, the trace on the circuit board feeding that pin is VERY thin and won't be reliable with an appreciable amperage running through it.

The 4a is not designed to supply power to external peripherals, as a general rule. That 5V pin is only designed for a teeny bit of current to power the (surprisingly miserly) speech synthesizer.

There were probably restraints on other game console versions, unoficially. Coleco had the game console rights to Donkey Kong at the time, and was developing all the game console ports, and naturally wanted the ColecoVision to look better than the competition. I've never seen any verifiable confirmation that they intentionally made sure it looked better, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit. The 4a is a computer, though. Atari had the computer rights, and no need to nor interest in making Coleco's game console look better.

Sounds like a bargain to me!

Given it apparently works at 60 Hz but not at 50 Hz... it seems likely your 9929 is actually a 9928.

That is a beast of a 4a right there. Mine's at the "I removed the greasy nasty felt" level of mod. Nothin' worth showing off.

A cost-reduced version of the system board with fewer components and a compatibility issue or two.

The Vectrex's Cosmic Chasm predates it. I've seen that credited as first before. Which isn't to say Choplifter didn't deserve it. I'm surprised there's not a TI version out there.

I have no story. Dad had a TI since before I remember. I'm told he had a 4 and traded it in for a discount on the 4a, which would mean we had a TI home computer before I existed. By the time I was old enough to use it as more than a game cartridge player, it was pretty well loaded-out. I typed homework up on Funnelweb running off a RAM disk and thought nothing of it aside from how loud the printer was. We built our first IBM-compatible in 1995. 486 while the Pentium math bug was all over the news. But in a family of packrats, nothing goes to the trash. It stuck around and continued to get use until the TV it was hooked to burned out. Then the IBM clone we had at the time(K6-2 system) took over that desk and the TI moved into the garage until I fished it back out a few years later.

So you could 2D print a replacement, if you had the ability to print with conductive ink.

Hooray!

I have one fully armed and operational at present, with black and metal console and loaded p-box(32K, RS-232, floppy controller, TIPI). And a beige console ready and waiting in reserve with a second p-box(32K, RS-232, floppy controller, Horizon). (I actually intend to put an F18A in the beige unit once they are available. )

Other groups WISH they could report a doubling of membership in four years.

Cyrix was the worst if you were playing Quake. Meanwhile, it seems like most of the world's perception of the 9900 is shaped by the 99/4a(and all its quirks) and just a handful of sources, like https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/the-inside-story-of-texas-instruments-biggest-blunder-the-tms9900-microprocessor And certainly, the 9900 had a few issues. So did the 8086. As I understand things, the big thing that tipped IBM to Intel's offering was a non-technical feature: Intel was JUST a chip maker. TI, by contrast, made computers, and were one of the biggest names in the industry. This had a few repercussions for a 9900-based PC. One was that it put you on the back foot because you were buying parts from your biggest competitior. The other was that TI kinda didn't want to SELL you parts all that badly because you would be competition. Intel offered all the developer support you could ask for in 1979, because they really really wanted you to buy their parts, and this support came without any baggage or ill will. TI's external developer support was somewhat miserly, to my understanding. And it wasn't like TI hadn't JUST yanked the rug out from under all their calculator customers(hi, Commodore fans!) by putting the Datamath on sale for less than they had been selling the components. Trusting them to not do it again would be hard, and I imagine IBM's team was already looking for the knife.

TMS9918A, unless you're using a PAL console for some reason.

Haters gonna hate.

Very true. I sorta feel like that is on-brand for the home computer division's entire all-too-brief life, though. A good line of products designed by talented people that were repeatedly kneecapped by bad luck and sabotaged by poor management. ... Which, to be fair, still places them far ahead of MOST companies with an established minicomputer business in this era.

I feel like your original question's never really been answered. TI BASIC is much more limited than BASIC on most other microcomputers is. There is a lot you simply can't do with it(Playground exploit aside), like utilizing expansion memory, running assembly programs, or accessing sprite hardware. Hence, there's a lot of software that can't be run with just TI BASIC. TI Extended BASIC is the BASIC the console should have shipped with in a more reasonable world, and makes it possible to access most of the system's capabilities as well as load assembly programs. It is, more or less, what someone would expect BASIC to be if they came to the 99/4a after experience with a diffrent microcomputer and was not familiar with the 4a's "quirks".

I would swear I saw instructions to modify the system for 1kB of scratchpad once, but I'm unable to find them.

It is a lovely morning in the P-Box, and you are a horrible goose.

I respect his ambition.

Good times, indeed. I strung one of the "technical support department of Windows" guys along for a while once. When he finally realized what was going on, he shouted "Your computer is a piece of shit, and so are you! Fuck you!" and hung up. It was my finest moment.

BRRRRRRRRT! chugchugchugchug BRRRRRRRRT!

Hang it off the rear expansion port and it'll be the first time the thing's ever been used. Poor computer's been yearning for this.

Honestly, I've sorta got the opposite view. It is difficult to find content about the other machines BECAUSE there's so few posts relative to the 4a.