etownandy

Apologies in advance, but I'm cross-posting to a few groups. I have an interest in holding a classic computer and gaming expo in central KY (near Louisville) sometime in the Autumn of 2018. My intent would be for an event free to exhibitors, vendors, and guests. My big problem at the moment is finding exhibitors - people with neat classic stuff to show off. If you have something you'd like to show off and talk about, Elizabethtown KY isn't too terribly far, and your schedule is fairly open for Autumn 2018, can you drop me a line at [email protected]? Or quote me and reply here. Thanks in advance! -Andy

Apologies in advance, but I'm cross-posting to a few groups. I have an interest in holding a classic computer and gaming expo in central KY (near Louisville) sometime in the Autumn of 2018. My intent would be for an event free to exhibitors, vendors, and guests. My big problem at the moment is finding exhibitors - people with neat classic stuff to show off. If you have something you'd like to show off and talk about, Elizabethtown KY isn't too terribly far, and your schedule is fairly open for Autumn 2018, can you drop me a line at [email protected]? Or quote me and reply here. Thanks in advance! -Andy

Small world, huh? Lima boy originally. I came to Etown the long way around (through the East, Lexington, Richmond, Louisville). I'd still be in Louisville, but drugs, crime, housing costs, and traffic finally got to me. I never thought I'd end up in a place SMALLER than Lima, but here I am. Don't get me wrong, Louisville is a fine place with lots of really nice people, but it has the same problems as any large city. It's a fine place to visit, I just didn't want to live there anymore.

Yeah, it's a TAD premature, but since I have to rent the venue a year in advance, I figured I might as well announce it. No clue how big or small this is going to be, but I'm hoping getting word out sooner rather than later will help. It would be awesome to meet some of you, for sure, and Louisville itself is a nice place to visit if you want to make a weekend or more out of the trip. There's not a WHOLE lot to do in Etown itself, although there is a nice waterpark/pool for kids, a lake with canoe and paddle boat rentals, etc. Bourbon Barrel Tavern is a nice place for refreshment, and Wicked Eye Woman is a neat local restaurant. Louisville, of course, has numerous museums (Speed Art Museum, Louisville Science Center, Muhammad Ali Center, Frazier Museum, Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory) and lots of restaurants to try out.

I've hinted around about this previously, but it looks like this show of mine is now a go! The Classic Computer And Gaming Expo ("CAGE") is slated to be held next year, Saturday, August 11th, 2018 in Elizabethtown, KY. While open to all manner of electronic computing and gaming devices from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I definitely would love a good TI presence. Taking a page from the MUG playbook, the show will be FREE to vendors, exhibitors, and attendees. It'll likely be a small affair - the rooms I've looked at booking hold about 18 tables each and I've potentially got two rooms, so we'll see if that's enough. Depending on how many tables get requested, it's entirely possible that we'll set up one room for small seminars and demos. I'm currently looking around for vendors and exhibitors - people with something to sell or something to show off. I'll have a table myself with MAME, Raspberry Pi, and various emulators running on a flash card installed in a Nintendo 3DS. Elizabethtown is a small city of about 40,000 residents in central KY, easily accessible from I-65 and less than an hour's drive South from Louisville. My own TI hardware collection is extremely limited - a console and a partially full PEB - no F18, no AMS, no Flash carts...none of the recent cool stuff. I'd LOVE to have a 99er table. Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CAGE-of-Central-KY-259003814582850/ GoFundMe (to help offset costs of renting the venue, printing, t-shirts, etc): https://www.gofundme.com/classic-computing-and-gaming-expo

Ugh...sorry you're having all of this trouble! Let us know if the new image works. We all want you to get this going. I use mame4all to play most neogeo titles (metal slug, Neo mr do, Neo bomber man, etc.) so that might be an option.

One of my early problems was with casing. The TI in "ti99" must be lower case, I believe. The advantage with installing it from ./setup is that you shouldn't have to edit any of the config files. You might try going back to setup and doing an automatic update on all installed packages. That takes a while, but ensures everything is up to date.

IIRC, you have to have ROMs before an emulator will show up in Emulationstation. They'd be in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/ti99. I can't recall if I needed to transfer bios files, but I do have four present in the /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/ti99 folder. I'm a huge fan of the Logitech F710 with my Pi. Loved it so much I bought one for my regular desktop. Has plenty of buttons, no mapping required with most emulators, is wireless, and the batteries last a long time. FWIW.

FWIW, here's where I find it on my Pi. 1. Drop to a command line 2. Type ./setup and press RETURN 3. From the main menu, press "P" for "Manage packages" and press RETURN 4. Arrow down to "exp Manage experimental packages" and press RETURN 5. Arrow down to "148 ti99sim" and press RETURN I can't recall off the top of my head how to convert ctg to rpk (I did it several months back). I can easily post ctg and bios files here if need be.

FWIW, TI99SIM is now installable from Retropie's setup program. It's listed in the experimental packages section of the installer. That should let you install it and only leave the task of copying over ROMs/RPK files.

Only text, though? I mean, it's pretty simple to "print" to PIO in MAME from something like TI-Writer or Funnelweb, take the resulting .txt file, and import it into a word processor on macOS/Windows/Linux/etc for actual printing. But I'm more interested in graphics (as in my PagePro example). I know Bruce Harrison did some work on printing to ink jet printers...not sure what encoding they used (PCL maybe?) although that was mostly for printing TI-Artist files and such. It's not like I NEED to do this, of course...a modern word processor runs circles around something like PagePro (although I bet most of them won't let me type in any direction as easily). But it would be nice to get some output as I'm playing around.

LOL. I was painfully PAINFULLY under 18. I'm not sure I've matured (look at my profile photo). I've just gotten older.

Do any of the 4A emulators allow for actual printing? I know MAME allows you to "print" to a file. Let's say I'm using Page Pro and want to get an actual hard copy of a page. How might that be done with an emulator?

I was reading the TI RS232 card manual the other night, and there was a brief example showing you could do an OLD "PIO." That made me wonder...what kind of devices at the time would have been appropriate for such an operation? I equate the PIO port with printers. I am, of course, aware of things like PIO Zip drives, but those didn't exist at the time. Could you save and load between different computers using the PIO port as you would the serial port?

Neat process! As adults, we definitely lose some of the knowledge we gained in school but haven't used since. Physics and Chemistry don't really come into my daily sphere at all, so it's nice to go back and refresh myself from time to time. My newsletter writings are a pretty good indicator of how badly I needed the writing lessons, too. Although...gimme a break, I was under 18 at the time. <g>

Ha! Timing.......

Although...now that I read it again...it says you'd "gain access to PCD2." That makes me wonder if it's some type of telecomputing. I know a lot of the CDC/Plato stuff ran on mainframes. Anyone know how this PCD2 program worked?

The manual goes into no specifics on cost, how the system works, or anything. And I'm sure writing them would get you nowhere after all these years <g>. But the way I interpret it is that it's software that would run on a 4A.

I was reading the Plato manual the other night, and saw that TI offered the "PCD2" package for people to create their own Plato lessons. I've searched but couldn't find a copy of "PCD2." It sounds interesting. Any leads?

Old timers will get sick of me saying it (assuming they aren't already), but I actually still like QMC2 as a front end. Although, interestingly, they're still at version 183 (several releases back, they brought up the version number so it had parity with that of MAME itself). I WILL, however, drop to the command line anytime something doesn't seem to work. The QMC front end does a bad job of passing along errors (missing ROM/BIOS, config problems, etc.). But of course, it gives me the command line in its front end log window so it's easy to copy-and-paste that into a terminal window. I have numerous configs saved for the 4A. E.g. one for straight-up game cartridges. Another for TE2 speech stuff (giving me the speech synth, TE2 cart, a disk system, etc.). Another for TOD (with the cartridge and a disk of TOD games at the ready). Although changing carts and disks is pretty danged easy from the command line, and I know I could save scripts to do the same thing. All down to preference, I suppose.

But...surely that WAS a prototype. So ok, it made it into prototype for sure, and prototypes exist. But it was never GA, right? I don't recall seeing it in any price lists from TI or any catalogs.

Just trying to clarify...I believe the question was basically "Would TI have come out with a 32K expansion in the style of the beige redesigned hex-bus adapter and speech synthesizer?" It's an interesting question. A lot of the best disk software would still have required a controller and drive, which meant a PE Box. There are rumors of a hex bus disk drive that never made it out of (or even into) prototype stage. All of the hex bus peripherals seem to have concessions of some sort. Wafertape was faster than cassette, but slower than disk and not truly random access. The Printer 80 was pretty limited, as was the Plotter. The only peripheral that didn't seem to have trade offs was the RS232 (and face it, what really IS there to trade off in such a fairly simple device?) If the waftertape worked reliably and could have been a means of distributing software, then I suppose I could see a console with a hexbus interface, Extended BASIC, and a redesigned 32K. But then that probably means the console would have at LEAST three devices off the expansion port (speech, hexbus, and memory). Narrower than the original sidecars, for sure, but one bump and you probably disconnect something and lock up the system.

Pretty sure it only exists as a ROM. It was relatively unknown before the "Never Released Modules" series came about (there may have been mention of it in 99'er or Compute). I'd say it's equally likely that it got shelved because it wasn't particularly good. Certainly nowhere near as good as Parker Bros' release of "Frogger." What are the geometric symbols (triangles, circles) in the "water" meant to be? And would ET really hop on the back of a frog? Or an owl? The splash screen, IMHO, was the best thing about the game. When I played it, I was surprised that the speech didn't sound anything like ET or Elliot (I assume it was supposed to be the former, since one of the words it says is, "Ouch."). Given the number of voices we've heard coming out of the machine, surely they could have gotten closer. Maybe that was a finishing bit of polish that never got applied. ET At Sea is pretty enjoyable, though.

So you'd have what, only eight possible directions, and no variation in speed? It would be "joystick-like" in its movement, as opposed to "mouse-like?" I suppose you could partially compensate by having the pointer move faster the longer you moved the mouse (I seem to recall a joystick driver - for TI Artist? - doing something similar).

Makes perfect sense to me.