mozartpc27

I should have figured there was "cross-over," but I am - I confess it - a dabbler in the TI-99/4A community, as you can probably tell by my sig. My main interest is Commodore, but I picked up a TI-99/4A at a retro convention near Philly a couple of years ago and I have played around with the machine. Need to get a storage device so I can REALLY play around with it, but I prefer 5.25" disks to tapes and that gets a little pricey/difficult with the TI-99/4A, it would seem.

Same Site suggests the p-Code sidecar you speak of may be "vaporware," so if you have one you may want to edit it: http://www.ninerpedia.org/index.php?title=TI-99_sidecar_expansion What is the p-Code sidecar anyway?

Here is what "ninerpedia" has to say about the video controller, FWIW. They seem to think the sidecar version never made it out of prototype stage:

Ksarul and kl99, where did you get your controllers from? Are you the "original" owners?

Boy am I glad I found this thread. Ever since I read about the video controller, and the potential ability to read/write to VCR tapes, I have been intrigued, but everything I had ever read heretofore had suggested that the video controller was never actually produced. And yet, lo and behold. Mad Hatter, I see you are still occasionally active on the boards. Did you ever get your video controller up and running with a VCR? Why is it only compatible with certain VCRs? Any VCR I have ever seen has certain standard inputs and outputs and that's it, so I'm curious. Does your video controller have a serial number? I wonder how many were, in fact, produced. I would LOVE to play with that thing (not asking, just a fond wish!).

Never mind... I alighted upon a solution that will work, hopefully.

Kind of an odd question, but - I just headed down to Silver Spring, MD for work, where I shall be through Thursday. I lugged an old piece of 8-bit hardware with me, but, thanks to my little toddler undoing my carefully packed pile, I left the gosh darn joystick at home. Called a couple of places here locally, nobody's got one. Anyone live around here who has an extra one I can buy or one they can lend to me for a few days? I'm leaving Thursday. Unusual request, I know, and not usually one for the main board, but given its time dependence I thought I'd put it here so the most people could see it.

Hi all - I am thinking of purchasing this cartridge to play on my ColecoVision using the Expansion module: But I want to make sure that this isn't one of those cartridges that would not fit into the Expansion module properly and would have required that extender Coleco mailed out to those who asked for it. It's a Mattel produced cart, the game was designed for Intellivision originally I think and then ported to the 2600. I tried to find a list of carts that produce problems for the Expansion module 1, found a thread or two on here that started to discuss creating such a list, but no list. It would be helpful to compile one, if anyone knows for sure!

Sort of off-topic for this thread, I guess, but I saw KAZ's post and was reminded about the forthcoming Donkey Kong Arcade cartridge and it got me to thinking a bit. Now, I do not have the ColecoVision Super Module... I kinda want one, but that is another topic for another day. I have never purchased any homebrew; and with respect to arcade versions, in this day and age, I am sort of nonplussed by the notion of "arcade perfect" homebrew ports. I mean, I remember, as many of you do I am sure, feeling that arcade perfection was the pinnacle of imagination/achievement with respect to home system ports. It was the unachievable dream. But today, in an age of MAME, I can play the arcade games themselves, basically perfectly rendered, without worrying about a "port." Thus, I am less intrigued by the notion of getting "arcade perfect" versions of games for the ColecoVision. I actually remember feeling a certain amount of disappointment when I saw how close the Mario Bros. port to the ColecoVision wound up being to the arcade version... what I was hoping for was a "ColecoVision" version of Mario Bros., that would be in keeping with the style of the other Mario-based Nintendo CV releases, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior. Does this make sense to anyone else or am I just a lone voice in the wilderness here?

I just ordered this cart from the internet. And now I am interested in this question!

Wow, where'd you find it / how'd you get it? Even if I had one there wouldn't be room in my house, but it is undeniably awesome. Congrats!

So, can anybody help me out on this? Again, live near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But of course I will mail the disks anywhere.

I am in SE PA. But I can mail 2-3 disks anywhere in the good ole USA, I think it cost less than $3 last time, including the padded envelope I bought to send them.

Nobody willing to help a brother out, eh?

I am very new to the Atari 8-bit line, having "grown up" with Commodores. I am still trying to get my 1050 disk drive working. I therefore don't have much of an opinion about the XE vs. the rest of the Atari 8 bit field, but I will say this: the 800XL (and the 1200XL) have the most attractive stylings of any 8-bit computers. I like the C64C/128 look, but that brown-on-beige is really sharp.

Anybody? Mostly I need the disk drive OS (2.5 I guess), and it would be nice to have a disk with some program to test the drive.

Hi All, So, kogden had generously agreed to copy some necessary files on to 5.25" floppies for me so I could finally test out my Atari 1050 drive. I sent some floppies, we communicated, he was getting ready to send them back to me, and, since August 21st, has disappeared from the forums entirely. I hope he's OK, I can only imagine he's busy (I am thoroughly confident he is not trying to scheme me out of 3 5.25" disks). Nevertheless, I'd like to get on with testing my drive already, so is there any other generous forum user who might be willing to help me?

I've gotten into collecting classic computers (and to some degree systems, in that I have the Expansion module to play 2600 games on the ColecoVision - for which I use an ADAM these days), and this comment raises an interesting point to me. Whenever I am playing around with a new system, my go-to game is always to get Donkey Kong. I enjoy comparing the ports (the only classic system I had as a kid was CV, so that is sort of my "default"). I have a TI-99 and an Atari 800XL, and the DK port for both. Both were programmed by Atari. As good as the Atari 800 port is (it has the cement factory screen and some of the cut animation), the first screen is oriented like the CV, with Donkey Kong on the right side of the screen. This means there is one less girder to climb, and I assume this was done, as it was on the CV, since the expected orientation of the CRT screen for both was a television, 4:3, that is, wider than they were tall. The arcade game is of course taller than it is wide. But the TI-99 port, which is mostly inferior to the Atari 800XL port, and which should also have been created with the expectation that the computer is reporting video out to a "standard" 4:3 screen, i.e., wider than it is tall, like all home systems that use TVs, nevertheless has DK on the "correct" left side of the opening screen, and Mario has the full number of girders to climb. Since Atari did both ports, there must have been a reason that wasn't just difference between manufacturer. My guess is it has something to do with screen resolution of the machines, but I haven't looked it up, and I'm not anyway convinced that alone would account for it. It's a mystery to me why Atari would have this difference in its ports of the same game to two different machines. If nothing else, both of these ports underscore what a crappy job Coleco did porting the game to the 2600 and Intellivision.

Had to post this somehwere: just played my best game of Q*Bert ever. Round 6, screen 2. 145,975 points. Would have been second place in the most recent high score competition for that game... but still. The whole thing about doubles in speed at the beginning of the sixth round (I always default to starting on skill level 1, don't even think about it. Old habit from kidhood).

kogden, I'll send you a PM.

So, in furtherance of this project, I finally decided, on Saturday, to take the plunge and buy an Atari 1050 that I'd had my eye on at my local retro shop. Came with a nice box, figured everything would be cool. Well, I opened up the box, and... there was a disk drive, a starting guide, a warranty card... and that's it. No power adapter. No connector cable. No disk with the DOS. Fortunately, thanks to prior purchases, I already have a power adapter AND a connector cable. But, without the DOS disk, it appears I can't do anything. So, can anyone on here help me out in getting the initial DOS 2.5 disk? Anyone have a copy they'd be willing to mail to me? Obviously, I'll need to go back to my retro shop and complain... but I still want the drive, and I want it to work. I imagine there are ways to write working programs on to disks using a PC, as I can do with my Commodore... but it would appear I can't do anything without the DOS. Help!

I am more into classic computers than classic gaming systems, and with those computers I am more interested in what they can do as computers than as gaming systems. Of course, if you discount the gaming abilities of a classic system, with what are you left? Well, in the case of my Commodore 8-bit, at this point I have it pretty well tricked out. I can go online & post to Facebook or this site (like I am doing right now), and I have a fairly complete GEOS suite, which allows for a surpringly high degree of functionality. I do do real work on the Commodore - albeit very occasionally. Of course, I once read a post from someone on this topic about how one day they looked up and realized that none of the equipment they had wa stuff they had when they were a kid. With the Commodore, aside from the printer, that's where I am at. I still have a 64C and my original 1541 - in a box. I use a 128 with all kinds of things I didn't have as a kid. As for other systems, I am still collecting, but it sometimes feels as though I am wasting money. I only have so much time to play with these things, and with a 13 month old in the house, that time gets shorter every day. My main games system is a ColecoVision, for which I have just about all the games I want, except for maybe one or two - and I am not sure I want those at the prices they fetch. I also have the Atari expander for it, with about 8 2600 games. I never had the Atari expander growing up, and thus never played much Atari except at my cousins house - who did have the expander - and my friend's house, who had the 2600. In the end, though, I don't think there are many more 2600 games I really want, and I am maxed out on space. I have a TI-99 and a handful of games, and an Atari 800XL with another small handful. Also have a Tandy CoCo. not sure what I will do as the kid gets older and he wants stuff of his own. There are a few more things I want, like a disk drive for the Atari, but I am closing in on done I think.

Been away from this project for a bit - busy with work - but I am trying to get back on it. So, I would like to replace the top piece of the frame on my working 800XL with the top piece from my non-working one (the top piece and keyboard are in much better shape on the non-working one). However, when I open up the working one, I notice it has two wires - one blue and one black - attached to the top frame that the non-working one does not have. The black one is soldered to a piece of the main board, and the blue one is soldered to another piece of the top frame. I guess, looking at it, I would only have to unsolder one point, and re-solder it on to the working model It's not clear to me what these two wires are even doing. So, can I switch the top frames and keyboards WITHOUT moving those wires? Working model: Non-working model: I have actually done the swap - did it before I posted it - but, since I made the post anyway, what is the purpose of the blue and black wires, and were their absences the reason my other model didn't work?

That cable would be a heckuva thing. I have the 5 screen version of Donkey Kong Junior on my hard drive but no way of playing it.

Love the title screen. Love it. Makes it feel like a movie.