jedimatt42

We could start telling the folks selling 4's that they don't even have lowercase letters... So they should cost half as much as the 4a's [email protected]

I was in truth, only speaking for myself. Tonight is my company's annual party. I've declined the invitation 4 times already. People reach out and personally invite me, try to entice me with the fact that there are 'prizes'... But I told them if I go home, I win 3 hours This should be easier, because it will be aligned with my interests, which are broadly TI. It will be like winning an entire day of information and perspective on what others are doing, or wish they were doing with their TI. You can't buy that! [email protected]

I don't think there was a 2015 event. So I think what to expect, will largely depend on what the attendees want to share. I'm imaging a open discussions intermixed with an open-mike-like ( not for standup, or song ) demonstration or sharing, and my greatest nightmare 'mingling' unless Omega has a more structured goal in mind. Just having our sparkling personalities in one room will be totally worth it. [email protected]

My favorite part of this, is sticking a 64k 96Mhz processor inside the TI-99/4a just to translate keyboard state I have some extra boards printed, that I could make available. Also I have shared the design on OSHpark, https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/tlkbFvs3 [email protected]

That's awesome! I especially like the added LED. I love my PEB, it is the coolest. When cards don't have an LED, it crushes my dream of someday having the LEDs do a knightrider bit on demand. NO seriously, having the LED is nice. I'm used to looking at the lights for assurance that when my TI is locked up, the storage devices are off, and the memory is usually active. [email protected]

I had an interesting thought around these Telnet and Dialup BBS's. It would be cool if the message boards on them also were captured out to a website. I wouldn't want to take away from the participation, so maybe a delay, like a monthly digest. Maybe this is wrong for modern BBS's, if the social contract is exclusivity from the archives of the web. Just a thought. [email protected]

I think the TI-99/4a is self sufficient, given it's design purpose. It's just doesn't participate in today's multi-media 32bit highres icon, bitmap / svg, cloud computing, web based world. But to me, that is a good thing. From a productivity point of view, I did my high-school papers all on the TI. Pretty color printout cover pages on my father's Geneve. I used some wysiwyg tool too. ( I don't remember which now, but I think there was only one choice back then. ) My sister wrote her college papers on the TI years earlier in good old fashioned TI-Writer. Today, I write most of my productivity documents in markdown and vim, and let some tools convert it to pdf, and people think I must have used Microsoft Office. If pictures get involved, I have to step up to google docs. But my point is, less is more when productivity is concerned. Fonts and formatting options and column layouts, and all that are nice but unnecessary. Does anyone still print from their TI today? Is that a goal for self sufficiency? Software development can all be done from the TI directly. In fact, this is a draw for me. But I require a PC to support this effort in 3 main areas: * Reference Material * File Backup * Community Reference Material has an easy alternative. Kinko's, or whatever today's equivalent is. I could print all that out. I have indeed printed out the fbForth manual. It's just how we used to do it back in the 80s, so when I picked up a TI again, that felt natural. Although most of the available reference material I have uploaded to my google books acount, and read from my phone or tablet. ( I consider those PCs ( bigger computers than the TI ) but then again, it feels more like they are just substituting for 'book' in a workflow I wouldn't even want to pursue on the TI. ) File Backup is a 'no-contest' situation. This is where HDX is my favorite, and I don't actually want any of my computers to be self sufficient here. My PC's have PC's that they depend on too for the same reason. I sure would like to possess a mass storage solution directly on my TI, but that wouldn't be for my working file set, but for the static things that don't change. Community is an area where the TI teases us. You have the browser project. We can now use the piles of technology around serving up data through HTTP. We just have to customize the servers to give us the data in a form our TI can display. This doesn't require much change to the TI, but more to building services that exploit it. The browser doesn't quite yet have the interactivity features for services like an Atariage forum, but then we have UDS and Telnet hosted BBS services that do. However, those services still appear to be designed toward the volume of data that was available yesteryear, and don't provide the search-search-search based interface for data retrieval that has proven necessary even for the volume of info on this single slice of Atariage. Another thing I do that requires a PC, is burn eproms that this community produces. Back in the day when the TI was designed, they expected users to go to a vendor for that (modules/solid state software), and today we have Arcadeshopper. I don't actually want the TI to turn into a thing that downloads and processes 3megabytes of data per click. Because that is what I hate about the PC. Somewhere, I think Omega asked if the TI obsession is a mid-life-crisis. I know it is for me. I'm reaching back to a time when I didn't need to do the things that make modern PCs a must. A time with less responsibilities. I'm rebelling against how all the security agents and network dependencies make windows soo slow when they fail. This time now where 90% of the time my fiberoptic internet connection lulls me into thinking it is ok to be downloading 3 megabytes of advertisement per 2k of text that I want to read. I often wonder how did the Amiga seem so modern and yet so speedy. ( I've decided it was because it used 2 bits per pixel, not 32bits per pixel ((for most people))) I think I ranted... sorry. Now what would it take to make my TI provide me with sufficient computing that I wouldn't need a PC in the house? If you want to go there, we'd have to get Amazon a BBS system to order from. But then the TI would still be too slow to show me the reviews and page through all that text, and so before long, you'd have to almost turn it into a PC. Give it a high res display, a co-cpu that can pump the data through, or a primary one that can also handle being a TI-99. The thing is, it doesn't take long where you get to ruining the TI. So, what keeps me in my TI, doing TI style things, the TI way? Multicarts. What I would wish for the TI, is more mass storage availability. * The multicart paged off of SD card model would work. A multicart that actually supported multiple programs designed to run directly out of ROM, where all the programs are starting at >6000 and can use the banking schemes as though they are alone in the cart, so we can load a fbForth and TurboForth and TIXB all off the same cart. <- This would aid self sufficiency in using a TI to do TI things the TI way. Soft solid state software. To add to that, it would be cool if in XB you had a DSR to load and save files off of the storage in the cart. Ideally directly customized by the user on the TI. * Very Large persistent storage - I depend on HDX for this today, as it is the only mass storage available to me. I only use the HFE storage on the TI for things that refuse to run off mass storage. Mind, I still want my HDX as it serves as a network drive, where I willfully violate the point of this conversation. * Large persistent ramdisk storage - As I ranted about earlier, solid state takes the cake. I prefer zero load time ( most of the software in the multicarts we have today are 'rom-disks' if you will, as they have to be copied to RAM before they are run. ) direct rom execution, but next to that, a big RAM disk would be the preferred DSK1. replacement to me. It needs software that does folder shuffling for all that old stuff that expects DSK1, so you can swap between things that expect DSK1. On the communications front, it would be cool to get away form the UDS-10 and have a device a little more TCP/IP oriented. Say an microcontroller with an Ethernet or wifi port, and a TCP/IP stack in it. Fronted by an actual TI DSR. Inside the microcontroller you could put an HTTP cache. You could even put an optional filter. The DSR interface could be more straight forward about opening connections of specific protocols, so that most of the protocol is implemented in the microcontroller, but the payloads are handled like streams. It might actually be easier to work with web content and file transfers if the DSR for GET requests was random access file oriented. Maybe something like one device endpoint that you write an HTTP request to like GET /someurl, and assign it to a request buffer, and then another device like BUF1.REQUESTBUFFERID, that is the cached random access file holding the results of the request. Let there be sockets too, for BBS/telnet access. This could be a lot faster than going through our serial ports. Obviously, the DSR skill set needs to grow to build these sort of things. Oh, and then don't forget, if your purpose for a TI is to play old games and newer games, you can embed 32k in your console, and use the multicarts and that TI becomes extremely self sufficient at being a retro gaming console. What all do you do with your TI's that require PC intervention? [email protected]

Every year! [email protected]

I didn't know facebook did stores. I hope it brings visibility to you and our TI. [email protected]

I implemented a solution for the theory above, and didn't see any difference in behavior, but at least now I believe that part of the code is more correct. Then I stewed over things for a week. And remembered some really stupid code around FCTN_EQUALS, I deleted that and 'TtHhIiSs' behavior went away. Using TIMXT for a while, that seemed to work just fine as well. ( Althought that wasn't failing for me previously either. ) The firmware changes are on my website, and up in the git repository... Along the way, the 'programming' port on the Teensy is a little surface mount USB micro connector. Chris was able to break this right off the board. There is no through-hole anchor on this connector. So be gentle. Hopefully the need for post-installation use of the programming port will become obsolete before too much longer. [email protected]

Thanks, that information is helpful. Very helpful. [email protected]

I cleaned my TI's GROM port on Valentines, and it has been in a better mood ever since. [email protected]

Yep, that's all of volume 1. Mizapf's TiImageTool on my linux laptop makes it pretty easy. The time consuming part is that much of the articles or software docs in them are formatted for printing, or in some cases ti-writer/myword formatter format. So I do a bunch of work stripping that out, and reviewing... But that's really what I want anyway, an excuse to review ALL of it. I've got to take a couple days off from it, now that I've got it down... A little travel for work. [email protected]

I'm glad you are enjoying the effort. There is so much information and history in there. I've worked on making the process faster today. [email protected]

One requirement for the gglabs device, is that you need a component display that supports 240p component input for our standard video modes. Looking at the specs on all my TVs, they do not support anything below 480i. Are their any tools for the Geneve that will put the 9938 into interlace mode? This would mostly be as a curiosity. Actually I should like to test interlace with the GBS 8200 upscaler I've been using too. I vaguely remember a gif viewer that would allow interlace mode... [email protected]

I've converted the Disk distribution volume1 issue 1 to markdown, and then the static site generator I use turns it into the html you see here: http://ti994a.cwfk.net/9640news/9640news.html http://ti994a.cwfk.net/9640news/volume1-1.html This is not 99ml. Sorry, I haven't had a chance at that yet. But, the intermediate markdown is basically text. I should be able to use it to generate 99ml. I'll give that a try after I have some more content in markdown. [email protected]

Thanks! I'll likely steal this text

Answer: Beery Miller.

A couple questions: Is there any correlation I can make between CATXX and the approximate date? Even an approximate year would be better than no historical date information. I can't stand the part of the internet that has no date attached to the content. I don't want to add to that. There are CATXX folders that have no entries. Was that a year/month/quarter when the 9640news didn't publish? And is there anywhere an overview of what the 9640news was, and who published it? Maybe someone recalls a Micropendium announcement or something... I would like to preface this material in some way.

See this thread about the web-browser that can run on a TI-99/4a with a UDS-10 Serial to Ethernet device. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/231274-stuarts-ti-994a-internet-web-browser/ Thanks, I'll take a look at that. I might just use it as a java/groovy API too. [email protected]

So, I want to go through all of this to catch up on what my Geneve can do. But it frustrates me a bit that this is all up on the internet in forms that cannot be searched by the all mighty google. As a disk-azine or whatever they liked to call it, it is difficult to consume without tools like TiImageTool and Ti99Dir on a bigger computer. As I go through them, if I were inclined to spend the effort converting .arks of text to txt or html, or pdf, and re-publish in modern form, would that be OK? Who do I credit? They look like compilations of other publications, and someone must get credit for the original curating effort. [email protected]

Oh, and pretty awesome of you to go digging into the HDX protocol taking it as far as you did! [email protected]

there has been repeated expression of interest in a lighter weight / cross platform HDX server. I recall folks wishing they could run it on something like an ARM based Raspberry PI. From what I recall, strolling through the history on this forum, most people seem to be content/happy with the HDX board/mod to the RS232 card as is. I'm sure there has been lots of debate over the years regarding if the TI RS232 port being DCE instead of DTE is proper or not. As hobby craft, I personally like having the y-splitter per Fred's diagram that yields DTE PC DB9 ports, as well has having a DB9 null-modem cabled up. This, has little to do with the design of HDX. As for use cases for HDX, I actually have never used the DSK2PC function. I have Gotek drives, but only use those for software that requires being on DSK1. I use the HDX for all other data storage, using the file on a disk model. Presently the storage is on my PC gaming rig, which heats my room excessively even while doing little more than hosting files for the TI. File access is faster than with the floppy emulators ( at least with my single density floppy controller ). Downloading a file from this forum, and dropping it into your HDX storage server is so much easier than transferring a .DSK to an .HFE and then putting that on the sdcard/usb-stick. I would actually like to see the server running on a raspberry pi (2), I would configure it to use a network share as storage, with that share also used by Classic99 on my laptop, when desired. I don't actually use emulation very often, but when I do I wish I had already set up the use of my network storage. Of course, lacking a cross platform server, I've been tempted to just throw money at it: http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00X4O6GRK?psc=1 or an intel compute stick, or similar product. A raspberry pi is considerably cheaper. [email protected]

Ah, nice. Yes it plays any of the mus files just splendidly. I hadn't realized the distinction before. [email protected]

Thinking out loud... so if you are writing a scan routine, you only have to turn of P5 on the 9901 if you want to look for FCTN, some numbers, and UP on the joysticks. The rest of the time it can be left on, and if row 4 is LOW, the alpha-lock must be on. My Teensy code is responding to change. And so if a routine is leaving the P5 high, while stepping through the decoded columns, and I'm momentarily turning off the alpha-lock row when FCTN, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 1 are not pressed, just before I then look to see if P5 is on, and set it back on. ( LOW == on thanks to the pull-up-resisters ) (There is no way that sentence passes a grammar checker.) Fast reading routines can actually see this, and I get TtHhIiSs BbEeHhavior. That's my working theory at the moment.