fimbulvetr

I still have my ti99 from 1981. My parents bought it shortly after release, and paid through the nose for it. Still works too! Somewhere in storage I also have an RCA Studio II and some cartridges for it that my parents got in the late 70s. I still have (and am using right now on my Win 10 desktop) the same IBM Model M keyboard that I got back in the late 80's. Those things are indestructible, so I never bought a new keyboard, just kept using the same one for over 30 years.

My kids and most of their friends have learned to program in Scratch, and most schools teach Scratch. They have made programs, games, and programmed robots with it. Scratch is a visual language, so very different from typing into a command line like I did back in the day, but they are still learning programming skills.

There is a scan of Dragonflyer (Spot Shot) in this month's High Score Competition thread.

Depends on the game.... usually I prefer my Suncom Tac-2 joystick, but for games that need really quick orthogonal movement, like MunchMan, the old TI painsticks with their short throw can't be beat.

Thanks! It is definitely a fun game.

Your video is where I snagged the screen-capture of the instructions from ... it is a very helpful video. Thanks!

Never mind, found one! Now I know what the countdown number at the top means, and why I couldn't move to the left at times....

Is there a scan of the manual kicking around for this game?

I feel like there is something I just don’t get about the strategy for this game . . .

Oh man, that is quite the tale. That is around the time my dad got an offer in Lubbock to work as an electronics engineer with TI. He hauled the whole family down for a week to look at houses and visit the town. I remember it as an arid wasteland, and Prairie Dog Town. After we flew back up to Buffalo my parents never mentioned Lubbock again, and a couple months later we moved to Canada.

I finally got around to carving up an old case, as I was never happy with the quality of the 3d printed one I had mine in before.

It looks like the Plato cartridge crashes the machine before it accesses the disk drive. Normally, the cartridge starts, there is just a quick blink of the disk controller light with no access of the disk (maybe it is just polling the controller to make sure it is present?), the splash screen loads off the cartridge, then it loads the course information off the disk. With the TIPI at >1000, Plato only gets as far as the first blink then it freezes before the splash screen.

It’s an ugly soldering job, but I now have a “Plato switch” on the TIPI.

For me it seems to be when CRUBASE is not set to>1000 and I make any bad call, whether a typo or mistake in capitalization. A soft reset isn’t good enough, I need to power cycle the PEB and sometimes the 4a if I use the reset button on my Ubergrom. I have to be careful setting the URI shortcuts as some cause a lockup if the URI is capitalized and vice versa. I have been setting CRUBASE to >1200 or >1400 when using Plato. My setup includes a ti disk controller, a new SAMS card, Corcomp rs232, and the TIPI with a pi zero w. I also have a sidecar speech synth plugged in. That said, with CRUBASE at >1000 it works and resets on its own when I make a bad call, so it really is only a problem when I mess with the jumpers.

Yeah, I’m used to capitalization sensitivity with the 4a, I was just surprised it was locking up the computer and requiring a hard reset with the TIPI. i think my long term solution will be a switch on the jumper. Right now I just put the jumper on as needed, and that works perfectly. Plato is a weird edge-case, and as soon as my kids can go back to school they will probably never look at it again.

Are you using the web version?

Since I set the CRUBASE for my TIPI to >1400, and I’ve also tried >1200, to be able to use the Plato cartridge, I’ve had to power cycle the PEB to reboot my 4a if I mess up or make a typo on a call to the TIPI. It seems really sensitive to capitalization as well. When the CRUBASE is at default with no jumpers, I don’t have to power cycle the PEB, it works just fine and never hangs. It looks like the problem is with hanging on the disk controller, as that light stays on and the whole system freezes at a blue screen.

Speech in PEB is still one of my most wanted items.

I just installed a TIPI in my PEB this week, so I'll try to be there!

This is an awesome project. I've been thinking a mini-PEB would be a good way to use all that extra space in the speech synthesizer for years now.

(I should have posted my score from last month though ... Dr. Mario games are my thing, and with Tex Turbo I got to the point where I could just get into a flow and kept going until I got bored and turned it off)

I am really finding this game tough. I have no idea how you guys get those scores, as I seem to have a hard time getting to 1000 pts.

Yes, it was set at the default setting of >1000. I put a jumper to set CRUBASE to >1400, and Plato works fine. Must be some sort of weird incompatibility?

I just got my PEB tipi set up today, and everything seems to work great but for one thing: my Plato cartridge just locks up with the tipi board in the PEB. I've been using a Lotherek drive as Disk 1 for all the Plato modules. I can access the Lotherek and my 3.5" floppy no problem with disk managers and whatnot, but no luck with the Plato module. The floppy controller light just turns on continuously and the computer locks up on a blue screen. Any ideas how I can get the thing running? Or is Plato just incompatible with the tipi? This wouldn't be a big deal except for the fact that my kids have been using Plato every day since the whole coronavirus lockdown started.

Just look at all that money you are leaving on the table!