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JB

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Posts posted by JB

  1. Posted

    8 hours ago, ulikh said:

    And what is the cause, is the power supply insufficient, or something between power supply and port insufficient.
    In other words, would replacing the original power supply with a more powerful one solve the problem?

    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.

  3. Posted

    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. 

    • Like 2

  8. Posted

    1 hour ago, Airshack said:

    One of the first (maybe the very first) home computer games to be ported to the arcade, not the usual other way around. 

    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.

    • Like 1

  9. Posted

    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.

    • Like 6

  14. Posted

    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.

  18. Posted

    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".

     

     

    • Like 3
    • Thanks 2

  22. Posted

    8 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

    Yeah, so, yesterday I had a moment and called up the IRS hoax people.  The guy threatened to come out and arrest my "bitch ass."  Good times.

    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.

    • Thanks 1
    • Haha 1
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