FarmerPotato

If you read the source, you'll notice that the Speech Editor has graphical output! It makes little bar charts on the terminal. It puts a "display list" into the DAC buffer. You connect the output to an oscilloscope!

I look forward to dumping the ROM! 2532s. Anything you can do to test on the 4A would be welcome. (Any typos are mine.) My thoughts: VSP! VSP@ and GETBITS are the only words missing? Should be straightforward to implement in 9900 assembly. If you want to mock it up, VSP! is a no-op. Mock up GETBITS and VSP@ to return (requested bits of?) a CALL SPGET string (XB). Maybe bit reversed. Is this all FIG-Forth? In my dad's Lubbock speech papers, I found a 1982 version of the TI Forth manual. It is bound with a nice report cover. Clearly there was interest in Forth at TI.

Forth source from the Speech Education Module User's Guide The SEM was a single-board kit produced in 1982 to demonstrate the TMS5220 speech chip. It had the VM60002 "Industrial Vocabulary" PHROM. (phrase ROM or TMS6100), two serial ports, and audio out jack. User software was a speech editor, written in Forth. The Forth source of the speech editor will be of interest to 4A users. So I'm posting in TI-99/4A Development. Most of the Forth should be compatible with the Speech Synthesizer. The 2532 EPROM in the SEM is the Forth interpreter, written in TMS7000 assembly or Forth, plus the compiled source listed here. This source is Appendix L of the manual. About 7 more pages of code are in TMS7000 assembly. This code sends bytes to the TMS5200 and reads the PHROM. I haven't typed it in yet. It's not clear to me how it's called from Forth. Each routine ends with a RTS instruction. I don't have the complete manual. Sadly, I don't see any source code for the Forth interpreter or kernel. It would be really sweet to have a Forth cartridge for the CC-40 or ExelVision. If I find that source, I'll post in the CC-40 forum. ( EDIT: comments in lower-case are mine. ) ( EDIT: comments at top are mine. ) SPEECH_EDU.FS

John Philips' story fits with an anecdote I heard. Texas Instruments engineers would go to the arcade under the student center of Texas Tech University, to see what was "in". TTU had the most impressive arcade in Lubbock.

LOL same! I was trying to cheat by editing sectors when I stumbled across some familiar hex codes, like 0103070F. Then, monster parts! Starting using up graph paper. I replaced some monsters using DISKO too.

https://xkcd.com/2928/ Software Testing Day

Rolling around in my head for a long time: a big update a little demo of mine. What kind of timeframe are we looking at?

"Taking the Wraps Off the 34020" BYTE Magazine, September 1988 on www.ardent-tool.com

Some history of the TMS340, from Karl Guttag's blog. (Technical leader of the 340. Well-known for the 9918, 9995.) Links jumps to the anchor: Appendix 1: My 1980s History with Bitmapped Fonts and Multiple Monitors https://kguttag.com/2023/08/05/apple-vision-pro-part-5a-why-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/#1980history Of note: the "340 Family Third Party Guide" lists graphics cards with a 34010 or 34020 (may be biased toward the survivors as of 1992.)

Bitsavers just added a TIGA DDK (driver development kit) from 1992. Vers 2.2 In http://bitsavers.org/components/ti/TMS340xx/ There is an IMD file, ImageDisk format. Context: Three software packages were available. The SPK includes everything from DDK. The DDK includes the SDK. SPK > DDK > SDK SPK - Software Porting Kit. All TIGA source code, including the PC and 340 drivers. The PC side is the Communications Driver. You edit for your board's parameters. The 340 side is the Graphics Manager. You edit this too for your board's capabilities. DDK - Driver Development Kit. Source code to TIGA Extended Functions, which you can link with your own extensions. The product is a Dynamic Load Module to send to the 340. Any TIGA extended primitive, for instance fill_rect, can be rewritten or removed from the API. SDK - Software Development Kit. C and assembly APIs (AI). 340 assembler, linker, and C compiler. Includes source code for examples and demonstrations. Host side requires Microsoft C. --- DDK is a bit of a misnomer, as it does not cover the two fundamental drivers. Without the SPK (software porting kit) you have only binaries for existing drivers, such as the ones for TI's Software Development Board. The compiled Graphics Manager driver for that SDB makes hardware assumptions: the amount of video RAM, a 34070 palette generator with only 16 colors. That's why you need the SPK.

How about a mini-screen to the side? With the full view. Or display a vector toward the other stone. Wondering how you imagined to play at sweeping?

I watched curling when I was a teenager in Colorado Thprings, Colorado (as it said on a Bill the Cat T-shirt). There were regular practices at the Curling Club, attached to one Olympic training rink. In adulthood, I was a Midwesterner, yadda hey. Curling was a can't-miss event on TV at work. There are curling clubs dotted up and down around the Great Lakes. I'm sure there was some friendly cross-border competition. We might be divided into Midwest and Great White North, but Curling is a common sport. I still don't really see the point of importing stones from Scotland to encourage them to slip over the ice, but I can't look away! Long live Curling! P.S. for those not sure: one person first pushes the rock, then another "sweeps" the ice to make a slippery path for it to follow into the scoring circle. You can bump the other team's stone. It's both calming and exciting when I watch. The stone, inexorably, slows down. My tranquility increases. (Incidentally, my ancestors immigrated through Nova Scotia and settled in the Upper Peninsula.)

I only once dialed into a BBS that used TE2's graphics ability--a few "CALL CHAR" patterns. Borrowing a copy of the programmer's guide convinced me it was too complicated. And we never used TE2 for dialup anyway. Instead, I went for ASCII terminal effects, like using backspaces to get a spinning cursor. My software, TI-NET BBS interpreted ^ in the STRINGOUT function, so you could embed code control chars in strings: -^H/^H!^H\^H (repeat for spinning cursor) My 15-year old self wasn't aware that ^[ could make the ESC code, 27, so I limited ^ to just A-Z. ONLY NOW, I had an idea that could have made TE2 graphics so much easier back in the day: The Extended BASIC to TE2 compiler! So this hypothetical compiler would have you save your XB program in MERGE format*. It would find any CALLs that TE2 could support, then translate those to the right codes. Output to a text file for your BBS to read. Skip any other BASIC statements. You might have one big sequence, or subroutines to call by line number. For ease of use, the output could have the original BASIC line numbers. Then the BBS or whatever could refer to the file by BASIC line number. Improving on that idea: it would be optimal to require line numbers 1,2,3 to be the entry points. Easiest for a BBS to fetch one line from a RELATIVE file. TINET referred to file-based strings by number--the MESSAGES file was a DF80 file read in at startup. It might have about 70 common strings (prompts, menus, etc) which were sent by CALL M(number). Something like that. I'm not suggesting it ought to tackle more than CALL CHAR, CALL COLOR, CALL HCHAR, PRINT, maybe CALL SOUND. But perhaps it could follow GOSUB and RETURN to compile subroutines. Probably into one big final string. Or, follow a convention that lines 100-199 were String 1, 200-299 were another. They could share GOSUBs from lines 1-99 or 1000+. OK enough imagining for now. Extra challenge: Write a new terminal emulator to emulate Terminal Emulator 2. * We knew about the XB MERGE format from the manual. If the XB manual was too confusing, there was a good 99er article about it. Still hard though.

Wow! For half the price of one hour on The Source! My original system only had cassette! Seriously, though, I just got Wine + Classic99 running. But yuck: First time I've seen Avast interfere with a brew install. Avast quarantined all the DLLs while 'brew install wine-stable' was writing to /private/tmp/homebrew*. "WTF! Mayday! This is Mac Avast outpost 49, there's DLLs raining down!" AFAIK, can't add Unix executables like 'brew' to trusted applications. (speaking of cassettes, thanks a lot, @OLD CS1) . Classic99 is running on with Wine-stable-9.0-osx64 + MacOS 13.something. Yay! I'm not tethered to my PC.

That was amazing. I had no idea that existed! They really streamlined the whole look by adding their beige monitor. Also, the CDC 7600 operator console. Wow, that's a dual-monitor retro battlestation.