PeBo

While I don't expect to find cartidges out in the wild, I am curious whether there are .dsk or .bin releases of Peter Pan's Space Odyssey or Pinocchio's Great Escape ?? I have found MAME and MESS versions, but I have not been able to find copies that run on real iron. I have Von Drake's Molecular Misssion, but after searching everywhere I can think of, I've never found the other two Disney releases in a native format. I can usually find anything on tigameshelf, IUC or WHtech, but Peter Pan and Pinocchio continue to elude me (maybe I haven't figured out a cryptic filename?) Could anyone assist in finding the remaining 2 (not intended for emulators) ? Professor Von Drake is lonely.

Same here...hate that the Vic 20 and Apple II beat us to it. (hell, the "Enterprise 128" beat us to it!) The money put aside for the 4A version is burning a hole in my pocket.

a few years ago, someone sold a poster-sized enlargement of the Parsec cover on eBay. It was probably about 2'x4'. If you're in a city, I would go into any print shop and see how large they clould blow up the covers before causing visible halftone dots. Probably cost you about $20 a cover depending on how large you go. The TI covers are fairly high quality prints (Databiotics, not so much) so you can probably triple to quadruple the size fairly easily...then you could exacto-knife out the Texas Instruments and title banner, leaving just the artwork for a mighty fine wallpaper for any gaming room. You could also just frame a dozen covers intact, swapping them out from time to time. Go big or go home they say.

Just saw that it is now available for the Oric1/Atmos & the Enterprise 128(whatever that is) and wondered if any of our homebrew talent have considered giving us our own version (that isn't a Speccy port). Not bitching, just curious.

Spent 2 weeks arguing with the ESPN (actually, the Canadian variant, TSN) AI customer service. Now you would think that when you use AI for customer service, that you would monitor the conversation and kick in with a human rep when things go south, but no they let me cancel my account rather than assist me. Wouldn't have pissed me off so much if it didn't keep writing to me about my issues watching hockey, when I was asking about trouble accessing Lacrosse games (congratulation Buffalo Bandits!!). AI isn't only stupid, it's being implemented by everyone to help ignore customers. And I'm really beginning to miss stupid people.

Love the string-twang effect in the title tune. I've never heard that effect on a 4A. Also, the table is such a loving homage to both the past and present TI enthusiast community. I can play it with friends, but only a TI person will "get it"... Bouncy, Skyway, Obstacle Course, and now Pinball 99. Thanks for letting us play with your balls Monsieur Moustgaard.

"WOW!" and "Thank You!", at this point, are just SO inadequate.

Unfortunately, I don't play well with shrinkwrap on game boxes. If I own a cartridge, I want to insert it into a cartridge port (discs in a drive, tapes in a deck) at least once and let it come to life. Also have to put the manual in a sleeve to stop page rot. As a result, I have taken an exact-o knife to any cellophane packages. I excel at collecting, but suck at being a collector. Boxes are for unboxing. (otherwise how would I mail-in my 40-year-old warranty cards ???)

All I can say is that I'm happy my nostalgia fix is NOT the Apple Lisa!! $1500 for a box of "fileware" floppies is a little rich for my snack bracket. (over $2000 CAD with GSP brokerage and shipping. Zach is nothing if not bold in his pricing. I asked his to combine shipping once for a few Moonbeam cassettes he was selling for just under $200 ea. He said no. Found them here in the buy and sell forum for $20 a piece. Seller was happy to combine shipping when I bought all of them...

My high school German teacher is retroactively fired. (although she's likely passed away by now - she was as old as I am now - 50 years ago - ouch!)

very cool, thank you for sharing. In my fake Turing-test program, I was very surprised with how difficult it was to create a intelligible approximation of the english word "Destiny" using phonemes and allophones. The synth struggles with enunciating the "des" (it comes out more as an exhale sound rather than an actual prefix). It works fine if the word appears on screen, so that you have a visual reference, but otherwise it is quite difficult to discern. (It is likely a similar problem to emulating the German eszett's 'ts" sound you describe) I would have thought that the sound "Dess" would have been straightforward, but I ended up spelling it as Deztiny, to make it more recognizable (albeit mispronounced). I guess 1980's speech synthesis is no competition for Majel Barrett's voice as the computers in the 23rd century.

Thank you for the cool trivia. It is such a rarety that I believed none existed... To be fair, German is a similar sounding language to English (for obvious historical reasons) and I'm sure even the harsher "ch" sound could be approximated with a little effort. Sad that TI never developed speech modules for the Speech Synth. That would have allowed for easy language swapping in cases where the sounds are not as easily mirrored using an English base. I was certainly obsessed enough to have collected all of them just to play Alpiner in all the languages listed on the menu.

The FlashRom is a great device for 8K carts (all the original Atarisoft, DataBioTics, Romox and Parker Brothers games), but any carts that supported/used the TI GRom will not work. That is a fairly large and noteworthy list. The Scott Adams should work fine (rebuttals welcome if I'm wrong), as long as you have a storage medium to load and save games to/from. Both the FlashRom and FinalGRom99 are cartridge emulators, they are not going to cover your disk or cassette needs. You will still need storage. The SD card is just for storing cartridge BINs. But tell you what, PM me and I'll get your details to send you my old FlashRom for the cost of shipping (you're on your own for an SD card). I don't use it anymore, and I'd hate to see you pay for something that you will out-grow shortly after owning it (and you really WILL miss not having that GRom support just as every 3rd party developer did in avoiding TI's Drachonian licensing policies). It's why Atarisoft/Paker Brothers titles have no memory available for cutscenes. And sadly, neither cart has game-state saves.

Same here, but I'm sure the family members that survive me will do whatever is necessary to maximize profits from my estate. So maybe I kept the original cart/label for them. And thank you sir...was inevitable that I would visit, now that I am living the good life (retirement) (I have a tipi/sams I need to learn how to use, and a PEB who's fan is in desperate need of replacing (although it does provide a realistic propellor sound effects when playing Spad XIII)) atariage continues to be the best source for such things. (and certainly more reliable than my geriatric brain)

I'll look up Blue Wizard, that's new to me. My best successes have been when I work on an english word, and find my attempts results in a nasal sound (such as the french words « on », « mon » or « ton ». The Synth has an inherent nasal quality, so I have fluked into coming close occasionally. otherwise my attempts always result in my giving up. Looks like TI programmers gave up too, as all programs that make use of the speech synth only 'speak' English regardless of the language you chose from the menu.

If you have the manual, DBT carts usually used the same font on their labels and manuals. My Micro Tennis came in a beige cart with a full square fold-over label that looked generated by a dot-matrix printer. I managed to open the cart without destroying the label, and created a more standard spine label for a replacement black cart to match the rest of my DBT collection (I'm anal that way). I did keep the original cart and label though, so I didn't worry about authenticity on my label. If I ever sell it, I'll swap it back into the original cart. Strangely, my Space Patrol came with a black label with white text. The only other variation I've seen from DBT's black text on white, was Junkman Junior's red on white, so I've always wondered if my Space Patrol's label is the original. (My Micro Pinball II has a Micro Pinball label, so not sure is that's a replacement or a misprint like Protector.)

Selling a 4A for $3000? Hell, flip it for a 030 Falcon! (but only of I had two 4/A's so I'd get to keep one - a Falcon would not compensate for the TI separation anxiety)

Looks to be in nearly as good condition and complete as the one I bought a few years ago for $75 CAD. (and mine included the bilingual Canadian box and manuals - documentation for two languages, and a speech synth*, for a $2, 925 less) Inflation I guess. nb.: no amount of phoneme manipulation can make the speech synth speak french (or Spanish or Portuguese, or Italian) without a locked-in english accent. If you have proven this not to be the case, please upload your code so I can steal it. (I have tried unsuccessfully for 40 years).

Graçias.

Thank you kindly Greg.

Makes me want to buy it just so it can be buried with more respect than its life provided.

Has anyone ported the Terminal Emulator II cart to a FG99 bin? I was working on a personal project of a simulated (aka: fake) Turing-Test using speech and TI_Basic, and it's a pain that I have to swap carts to access TEII speech-support. It is one of the few tools that I don't have on the FinalGrom99. (I have text-to-speech for Extended basic on disk which would actually make my life far simpler, but I really don't want to restrict myself with the memory hit that causes.)

I think we're all a little unduly influenced by eBay pricing... If the home brew is worth half of what I sold it for. then that's $300. So a bunch of carts without manuals, a homemade magic marker light pen and the system sold for $300. $300 for a 40 year old video game console is absolutely a fair price when being sold by an enthusiast within the retro-enthuisiast community. (Just as my two 4 MB STE's with a shitload of peripherals was a fair price at $500. (Even though POTENTIAL value was probably 3-4 times that price) Only those of us into retro-tech are interested, and we should all try to make things as affordable as possible for each other. A couple decades ago this shit would have all ended-up in landfills and many wives would have been happy to get rid of it to get the spare room back! Don;t go by the inflated price of appraisers and NOS hoarders and eBay profiteers, Think of buying and selling within your family, which is what I did. When I started collecting for the TI-99, kind sellers cut me major slack on pricing (like a massive DataBioTic/Funware rarety collections for a couple hundred dollars). They paid it forward, so now so am I. Anyway, it's Christmas!

I always try to put my systems back into the community at a price that thumbs my nose at those who would take advantage of collectors for ludicrous profits. Not so much an "awesome deal" as simply as a fair price for the system. But sorry, it was difficult enough to post this listing (I truly love the Vectrex),. So if I have to start splitting it up, I'll just keep it, and seek alternatives sources with which to supplement my budget (anybody looking for an out-of-shape geriatric born-again virgin for a good time...prone to unexpected naps).

Vectrex System (tons software/extras) $600 CDN Local Pick Up Only (Toronto, Canada) w/ VEC adapt (sega joystick adapter) Lightpen (Magic Marker homemade) Multicart 3.0 (w/ overlays for Pole Position, Spinball and two generics) and... Original Carts (no boxes/manuals): Armor Attack (w/ overlay) Berzerk (w/ overlay) Bedlam (w/ overlay) Clean Sweep (w/ overlay) Cosmic Cavern (w/ overlay) Heads-Up (w/ overlay) Hyper Chase (w/ overlay) Rip-Off (w/ overlay) Scramble (w/ overlay) Solar Quest (w/ overlay) Spike (w/ overlay) Star Castle (w/ overlay) Star Trek (w/ overlay) Star Hawk (w/ overlay) WebWarp (w/ overlay) Home Brews With Boxes, Manuals AND Overlays: Vector Pilot (Time Pilot Clone) Vextrexian (Galaxian Clone) Vextor Patrol (The BEST Moon Patrol ever...w/ battery backed high scores) Stramash Zone (BattleZone Clone) - Pictured This unit has never been recapped or anti-buzzed. Screen is crystal clear but slightly askew, indicating that recapping is overdue, but unit functions well, and the slight skew still lines up with all overlays. (Note only the display appears slightly askew...the photo below where the whole console is skewed is because I suck at photos) Overlays are 100% pristine and have been kept under plastic covers in a 3 ring binder Caveat: one joystick port is not functioning.