Imperious

If the Ram is hot, then it is the issue, at least one of them anyway. Make sure Your c64 power supply is good otherwise Your nice fixed c64 will die again. Hopefully You shipped the power supply too..

Alternatively You can load up the 6 gamecarts into Classic99 one at a time and work it out that way. You do have to modify the ini file to get that to work.

Awesome, thanks for the update. looking forward to it.

Just out of curiosity, is this still on the radar?

Thanks for that UKRetrogamer, the game is very tough indeed, and I agree that if it's in the original, it should stay. I was playing Miner 2049er before, another hard and frustrating game I'm not as good at these games as I once was, I distinctly remember clocking Parsec back in the 80's before my Original TI died, don't think I would get anywhere near that now.

OK, I found out You can get up there, You just have to be a bit to the right when You jump otherwise You hit a "Roof". Aside from that respawning is a problem, being that if You die because of a mis-jump, You keep respawning in that mis-jump and drop to Your death repeatedly until all lives are gone. Of course I do not know if that is a "feature" of the original. EDIT - Just read the above, looks like we both found the same.

In the Youtube vid of a Spectrum walkthrough at about 1.18 JSW jumps up through to another level. I cannot seem to get this to work.

The support here is truly fantastic. The stats are a bit unfair though, as many of the other computer's mentioned have other thriving forums elsewhere, like Lemon64, LemonAmiga, Denial for Vic-20, Amibay, EAB - Amiga. If You have a TI, this is where You want to be, without any shadow of a doubt whatsoever. The TI is a massively more interesting computer than it normally would be, all because of these forums and the Help and resources that are available, as well as the continuing development work in Hardware and software design that has blown myself and many others away, and pushed the often underrated TI to new heights many thought it wasn't capable of.

I noticed some bugs last night. Occasionally JSW spawns a few pixels below the top of the deck, but You can do a jump to get back on top. I'll do more testing and have camera ready to take pics. Also I might watch some Youtube vids of the original to see how that behaves. We used to have a saying when repairing TV's years ago. "It's a feature, not a fault". Customers would complain about things that were not fixable, like imperfect straight lines and convergence issues at the edges of the crt when they were viewing test patterns. So I don't want to complain about bugs that aren't.

Thick as a brick!

Finally gave this a proper go on the real thing. Very nice game, hard but fair in that it's Your fault when You die, aside from the odd bug. Curiously I haven't felt the need to kill the music on the real thing, but did very soon in classic99. Weird how playing on real hardware makes You a lot more tolerant of minor annoyances, some sort of atmospheric nostalgia induced thing happening there.

Holy Guacamole!! How many Disks would this come on?? Come to think of it, is the TI even capable of running games via multiple disks?, and if so How could You do that with a nanoPEB?, You can't physically remove disk 1 and insert another.

Thankyou both for that, I'll try the register method, don't really want to take the computer apart if I can avoid it.

Anyone know how to turn on the scanlines feature of the new firmware? I can't seem to find any information on how to do this.

Have You adjusted the brightness and/or contrast pots? Too much of either can mess up the sync and oversaturate the output.

Awesome! Thanks very much Matthew, I was aware this was coming so have been looking forward to it. I'll install this hopefully tonight.

Does this mean I could do an internal 32k mod, then have no issues with my nanoPEB connected? If so that would be good, as I don't always need the whole nanoPEB functionality, just the 32k for 512k carts and 64k carts.

The only old computer I still have that was purchased new is my Amiga 500, but has been upgraded with a dual kickstart and CF-IDE with 8mb ram. Considering that it was my only computer from 1989 -1994 it doesn't get used much. The first computer I owned, that was a Christmas present in 1983 was a ti99/4a. It dropped dead somewhere in 1986 as the characters on screen all got scrambled whilst loading aTunnels of Doom save from cassette. It got chucked in the pre-internet 90's as I never thought ahead to a day where I might be able to repair it or get parts. About 2 years ago a Family friend asked me what a Commodore 64 was worth. I ended up with it as it was dead, and did some computer work as a trade. That was where it all started though, as I became a bit obsessed about fixing it. I have become completely blown away by what parts I have been able to source from China. The most amazing thing is that there are warehouses with 30+ year old chips still for sale, and as a result I have most spares. To sum up i have 3 x c64's, 2 breadboxes and a c64c. Accessories Jiffydos rom, SD2IEC, Easyflash 3 3 x Ti99/4a's, accessories nanoPEB, F18A, 2x UberGROM carts, 11 Jon Guidry boards, 6 to be converted to 512k gamecarts., 3 already done. 3x Commodore Plus/4's, 2 work. 1x Commodore Amiga 500 as mentioned. 3x Atari 2600's, 2 Pal Juniors, 1 NTSC vader model, Harmony Encore cart 1x Commodore Vic-20 with Arfon Micro Expansion and 3k and 32k expansion carts. I do regret giving away my PC 486 as well as Socket 7 system, but did rescue my 15yr old AMD Duron PC from a friends Daughter before it was going to be dumped. I have found it very useful not just as a Dos and Win95/98 3dfx gaming rig, but due to the Parallel port I have burned a few rom chips from my Willem programmer, as well as using a homemade programmer for the Atmega 1284p for the UberGROM boards.

Thanks for the nice comments everyone. I sorted the intermittent blank screen issues I was having with resetting the cart with a FCTN-QUIT and Car wars not working. I reseated the CF card in the nanoPEB and it all worked perfectly every time after that. I think also that I should be able to do a slight improvement to the modding next time as it appears I don't need to bend as many pins on the ls378 socket up as there are a few from the 379 pinout that don't go anywhere.

Hi. I have quickly scribbled a pinout for converting a 64k Jon Guidry board (27c512 and 74ls379) to a 512k board (27c040 and 74ls378(AM25ls07 same)) I am not interested in giving a step by step procedure at the moment as there are a few different ways You could achieve the same result, as in I chose to not cut tracks on the pcb, but that is a way if You prefer. PDF's of datasheets are easily findable for all the chips used and also the TI99/4a cartridge port pinout. However You mod the board it is a good idea to be able to swap the 74ls378 as some do not start in the correct bank, and You can't do that easily if it's soldered in. I would strongly suggest using a multimeter to figure out what goes where before modding, as some pins need to be changed and some do not. As an example Pins 1,2,8,9,16 of the LS378 are the same for the LS379, but pin 28 of the 27c512 is VCC whereas that becomes A17 on the 27c040 (pin 30)

I finally got all the parts and modded one of my 64KB Jon Guidry boards into a 512KB board, and the good news is that it worked 1st time. Occasionally I have to turn off the computer and the NanoPEB as about 1/4 of the time I get a blank screen, works ok upon a proper reset usually. Only game that seems to not work is Car wars. Pins 1,2,8,9,16 of the 74ls378 (AM25LS07) are the same as the 379, all the rest as can be seen had to be changed. Pics attached, sorry for the slight out of focus images. The contacts aren't as dirty as the photos show, but I will clean them anyway. Only 5 more boards to go!

Mines a cheap chinese parallel port Willem, VERSION 5.0B. It programs most chips fine, but does not do Atmega chips. I think there is a newer version with a ISP connector onboard, or whatever it takes to program an Atmega.

For the 49F040 I used my Willem programmer. For the Atmega I made my own based on the following circuit. AVRDUDESS is gui and Avrdude all in one.

I had trouble using virtual com ports with my homemade programmer, even with FTDI chipset, but no probs with a genuine com port on my old win98 pc. Not sure whether a stk500 works ok or not with virtual com port, it might. You can get a gui for avrdude, I used Avrdudess. Only problem was it didn't like win98, but I could copy and paste the string I created and it worked well in command line mode Avrdude.

I thought I would share some pics of my friends 128 in 1 Atari 2600 Junior. He kindly let me pull it apart so I could share pics of its innards with everyone. As You can see by the Atari logo on the Rom chips it's a genuine Atari product, which makes perfect sense really, as who would go spending heaps on Atari 2600 games in 1991, and Atari could still sell an ageing console with lots of games already loaded. Maybe at at later date I will be able to get a list of exactly what the 128 games are. The Color-B/W switch is a spring loaded slider that selects the games in the currently selected rom chip out of the 4 installed.