dhe

I have this disk. 'lost treasures of infocom' It says it has been hacked for the Geneve to run in 80-columns. I tried MAME + Geneve + GPL + XB. the loader gives an option 8, for 80-columns. typing 8 results in further disk activity, with a return to the gpl main screen. I also tried Classic99 + F18A - I get a corrupt display. That got me to thinking. Is there an 'easy' way in either mame or classic99 to tell if software is trying to do a F18A or 9938/9958 'thing'? Of course, the obvious answer would be file corruption. hithike.dsk

AT29C256 - the pdf takes me to a -70 ns part number, will -90 work as they seem to be more common?

Thanks for the assist @acadiel You got to love a github (DuPal's) that starts off with "Don't expect no hand holding here." Wow.. Ok. Glad we got that out of the way! 😃

Thanks @NIAD That makes sense, I read the interview you guys did with Tony, and he seemed very engaged in doing a full Trilogy, even starting work on number 2. I didn't see that Sol was involved. The implosion of Sol and GODOS matches the timeline perfectly. There was a guy in the TI-99 world who was doing some really great programming late in the TI-99/4a life cycle, I think the pressure just became to much for him. One day he is there like a rock star, and the next he totally disappeared. I think the same thing might have happened to Sol in one way or another.

Reading through back issues of NIAD, Temple of the Snow Dragon was hailed as the block buster of all adventure games. There was a quick interview with the author, where Temple of, was to be the first in a trilogy. Moby games has a good write up here: https://www.mobygames.com/game/166447/temple-of-the-snow-dragon/ Here is a cover, where you can see it as a trilogy: Unfortunately over a period of time, it was mentioned in NIAD, there was a delay in the next game because of the incredible demand, a delay for bug fixes, etc, etc.... Then the sequel was never mentioned again. {saddly} Does anyone know the back story on what happen to that caused the developers to never release another adventure in this series?

Question on versioning in reference to use on a TI-99/4A.

tipi-dsr-2023-08-04.zip - TIPI DSR ROM - 32k binary EPROM image Is there an Electronically Erasable part number for this?

Will the oldest DSR work with the newest TIPI software? What about the reverse?

FWIW - TIPI was never designed to be a general service that ran under "linux" - it's a dedicated piece of hardware. So life will be easier if you think of it as an embedded controller. If you want to make sure it's secure, I would start with firewall-ing things down, to just the systems you want to talk with TIPI and having good passwords. You can go down the road of running other things on the TIPI - a web server for example and doing updates, and installing additional software etc, but if you do something that breaks the TIPI side of things, I wouldn't expect a lot of help over re-install from the original distribution.

Everyone loves a happy ending! 😃

Holiday break coming up, I will use the help pages as a guide to what is implemented.

Found this random shot on ebay, but I've never seen a pbox with out the front.

Right, and back to the BackBit Chip Tester. A received my unit and have been reading the documentation. I'm even more impressed with the unit, then I originally was. Not only does it test a multitude of obsolete chips, but it also can read PALS, and read and save ROMS, but there is also documentation on doing in-circuit testing vs "loose testing". I can see wanting to test a TMS9901, before cutting it out. I've included the current documentation. BackBit Chip Tester Documentation.pdf

That is a sucky place to be indeed.

Thanks, those are some definite "finds"!

TMS 9900 Assembler auf dem TI-99/4A, 2nd Edition S. Koppelmann/Simon Koppelmann 1987 German Assemblerkurs II, 3rd Edition Raush & Haub/Hagera 1985 German Thanks.

CKT - Designer, or real old computer company name?

Does it work? My memory from the 80's is gone, but I think I remember seeing the chip on the back of the board on a corcomp controller before, this only stands out, because I'd never seen that thing done before (and haven't seen it a lot since). My thought was - what the heck is a component doing on the solder side! 😃

You might want to try running things with -bench on the mame command line to get a better idea of how mame calculates how things are going.....

Back when millions of TI's were in use in homes, winter was always a dangerous time for TI's as (typically kids) would run around very dry houses and touch joystick ports as they were plugging in the joystick. that tiny static spark didn't do any favors for 9901's pins directly connected to the joystick port. 😃 Having the caps lock key engaged will mess with the operation of the joysticks.

FWIW - I would swap the keyboard to a know working console to verify it isn't fiddly mechanical hardware. If you DO replace the TMS9901, I'd clip the old one out so it's easier to desolder, and replace with a machine pin socket (you only want to replace that socket once). I've never had a clearance issue with a socket. The 9918 is socketed and STILL requires an extra riser to make contact with the shield to form a heat sink. Probability that the problem is the 9901 is high. Then scribble a note somewhere, having a console with a socketed 9901 is a very nice thing to have. 😃

Wishing so so many people hadn't thrown out the boxes, overlays, instructions, etc...

Wow FPo, I'd never heard that before. Good Info. Thanks!

Have you tried rebooting? 😃 LOL Also 6.5 is kind of old 7.4 can be found here. And I think there were some video xop's fixed. https://www.9640news.com/?p=490

@Tursi - I didn't capture the information, but when I ran Classic99 for the first time, Wine said - O' I need this and that, can I install it. So it was able to grab the things it needed. I liked wine/cross over in that it doesn't require a full Windows install and license, over parallels which is a more complete emulation, but does require a full install and windows XX license.