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CamTheBridge

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Posts posted by CamTheBridge

    Getting TI controllers (trackball??) to work on a PC

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

    50 minutes ago, arcadeshopper said:

    the ti joystick adapters need diodes also in the faq

    Thanks! So for example, if I wanted to run the signal for just the fire button on the Wico Trackball to the arduino for testing, I would want the track ball plugged into the wall, and I'd send the signal out of Pin 4, say into a bread board, then have the signal go through a 1N914 diode and then go into the arduino? Or are those diodes only used for the atari converter? I'm still new to electronics, so if this involves more work than I can accomplish in the week before my project is due I'll just do something else. Appreciate the reply

    Getting TI controllers (trackball??) to work on a PC

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

    Hey all,

     

    I'm working on a project for one of my graduate classes, just making a little game on the PC and I thought it would be fun to use the Wico Trackball to control it since I have on lying around, and an arduino (which can communicate with unity). I have one of these and can get a Sega Genesis controller to send digital signals to an arduino just fine using the pinouts I found online. I can't find any pinouts for the Wico Trackball, but it seems like people think it works the same as the TI's Joysticks.  But when I look at the pinout and follow that, nothing seems to register. I even tried using the TI's Joysticks but that didn't work either. Looks like the TI handles it's inputs a bit differently than the genesis, as it doesn't seem to have a 5V in or ground pin. Any thoughts on this? Is it even possible to get readings to send to my arduino? Should I just give up? Any input would be appreciated. 

     

    Thanks!

    Learning Assembly

    in TI-99/4A Development

    Posted

    21 minutes ago, HOME AUTOMATION said:

    Not required... If you have another way to start your program. Not sure, but I imagine you might get away with pulling the E/A cart out once running. Text to speech is a little trickier.:D

    Good to know. I'll probably make a separate post when I actually get that far. I know Parsec has speech in it, so I assume it must be possible to do since that game just runs from a cart

    Learning Assembly

    in TI-99/4A Development

    Posted

    12 minutes ago, BeeryMiller said:

    A good book to get started is at https://www.ebay.com/itm/TI-99-4A-99-4-Book-INTRO-TO-ASSEMBLY-LANGUAGE-FOR-THE-TI-HOME-COMPUTER-New/372757407012?hash=item56ca12a524:g:1GwAAOxyV85RzfSG 

     

    There should be scanned copied of the book somewhere, just not sure where the link is.  That is the best reference to get some basics down.

     

    There is another book by Morley I use frequently when looking for details on some of the instruction codes.  I just don't have a link for it to point you towards it at the moment, perhaps someone else does.


    That first link will definitely get you with some of the basics on setting some code up.  From there, I think you may be able to learn quite a bit from other people's source code, especially code that is commented well that explains why things are being done as they are.  There is plenty of source code up on ftp.whtech.com and people frequently borrow pieces of code for their own application, so no harm, no foul.

     

    Beery

     

     

    Thanks, this is super duper helpful. I think the commented source code will be especially helpful for me!

    • Like 1

    Learning Assembly

    in TI-99/4A Development

    Posted

    Hey all,

     

    Not sure if you remember me, but I used to be on the threads here a bunch 2 years ago. From what I understand I'm quite a bit younger than most of you (early 20's) and life kind of got in the way (finishing college finding a job etc.) so I didn't have time to play around with old computers and such recently. However I am feeling incredibly ambitious now that I have some more time and I was wondering how you all would recommend learning assembly? I played around a lot with extended BASIC and I really want to have full reign now. Are there any specific books you recommend? I have the editor assembler/nano PEB and voice synthesizer. Another question I have is: If you are programming in assembly, can you access the speech synthesis without any extra disks or carts? Or do you need a program (or perhaps to create a program) that can synthesize speech?

     

    Thanks so much all!

    • Like 2

    A game my friend and I were working on

    in TI-99/4A Development

    Posted · Edited by CamTheBridge

    Hey all,

     

    A little under a year ago my friend and I were working on developing a game using TI Extended BASIC, a nano PEB and Barry Boone's speedy loading speech synthesis disk code.

     

    Unfortunately the best working build of ours got corrupted and we were pretty discouraged from continuing. We've moved onto other things, but I managed to find a bunch of the files scattered on different locations across my computer and decided to compile all of the footage into one place. The video is just any material that we had used before we gave up. We're thinking about making a similar game using something that's easier to program on than a TI99/4a ahaha.

     

    Here's the link if you want to watch it: LIIINNKK

     

    The footage is recorded using a capture card from my real TI, no emulators. We coded a lot of it on the TI itself until we realized how much easier it was to code on a modern computer then upload the code using the nano PEB.

     

    I just wanted to share our progress with someone and I figured someone on here might appreciate some of the work we put in (hence why the video is unlisted). Don't feel like you have to watch the whole video, it's pretty long, I just wanted to put everything that we had done into it.

     

    We won't be pursuing this project any further, I just didn't want our progress to be lost to time.

     

    Thanks!

    • Like 6

    Running games with the editor/assembler

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

    If it is saved as a PROGRAM file, you would just need to press LOAD AND RUN in the E/A menu and direct it to load the program from the disk it is on. . .

    That's where I'm running into issues. Even on an emulator I can't seem to get that to work. It is a PROGRAM file, and I can save it to a .DSK file, but I can't load and run it. Both the PROGRAM and DSK are named CENT and doing any combination of DSK3 and CENT, or DSK3.CENT won't work.

    Running games with the editor/assembler

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

    Hey all,

     

    I haven't been using my TI much as of late, and I wanted to get back into things with a nice game of centipede. I don't own the game, but I have a ROM of it and in the past was able to play it using the editor assembler cart along with my nanoPEB so that I could assemble and run the game from my CF card. Unfortunately, I cannot remember how to do it now. Everything is set up, I have the editor/assembler diskettes on the CF card as well and they are working just fine. I can load the assembler and everything, I just can't figure out how to get this centipede assembly file working.

     

    From what I remember I need a .DSK file, and to copy that to the CF card, then I need to mount it on the TI into disk 3, then I need to call something like DSK3.CENT, but that doesn't seem to be working.

     

    Any ideas?

    Linking Data Between Programs

    in TI-99/4A Development

    Posted

    I often pass integer values back and forth by loading them into memory at the 'bottom' of the PROGRAM space in expansion ram.

     

    CALL LOAD(-24576,1,2,3,4,5) would load values 1,2,3,4,5 into locations -24576,-24575,-24574,-24573, -24572, respectively.

     

    CALL PEEK(-24576,a,b,c,d,e) would retrieve the values.

     

    The values are each 8-bit, meaning decimal 0-255. Larger numbers require some division and multiplication to store and retreive. You can even store strings by saving the length and each character to an address.

     

    This works so long as your program and run-time numeric variable space do not consume the same memory - you'd have to write a very large program or use a large numeric array to do that.

     

    Saving to disk works very well, too, but I find for simple values the memory works just fine.

    Wow, this method works so well. Thanks so much! This is definitely what I'm going to use

    Linking Data Between Programs

    in TI-99/4A Development

    Posted

    Hey all,

     

    I'm trying to make a really long program, so instead of actually wasting all my space with one program I have several programs daisy chained together in extended basic. So far I've had no problems, but things would be a lot less tricky if I was able to send variables between the programs.

     

    From what I understand, whenever you start a new program, the variables are all wiped to zero, but you can save values in specific locations on the expanded memory (like 8199 or something like that). I also believe that you are supposed to use (in some combination) init, load, link and/or peek in order to do so, but I cannot figure out how.

     

    Anyone know how to do this?

     

    Thanks!

    • Like 1

    Text to Speech program?

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

    Yea I had this issue all the time.

     

    RXB has CALL BLOAD("DSK#.FILENAME") and CALL BSAVE("DSK#.FILENAME") that save lower 8K in Program Image Format.

     

    I have converted all my programs to RXB as they load faster and do not crash. Besides works with SAMS too.

    My only issue with using RXB is that I want to be able to run my programs on my actual hardware and let other be able to run it on actual hardware easily. It seems like RXB is like another cartridge?

    TI Wico Track Ball

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

    Hey all,

     

    I recently got a Wico Trackball for the my TI and I was wondering what games are good for it.

     

    After doing a quick google search it doesn't seem like many people use it or at least write posts about it.

     

    I've only got to games at my house (I'm on vacation right now): TI Invaders and Parsec.

     

    I thought TI Invaders would be awful with the ball, but it actually makes the game shockingly more accurate (at least compared to the default controllers)

     

    I figured that Parsec would be amazing with the trackball given the full 2 dimensional movement (x direction and y direction) but it really isn't good. I can't move up and down fast enough in that game to dodge enemy fire.

     

    Any suggestions? I know centipede would be really fun, but apparently its pretty rare.

    • Like 1

    Text to Speech program?

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

    attachicon.gifTEXTSPEECH.DSK

     

    Text to Speech, runs out of Extended Basic - Requires 32k and Speech Synthesizer.

     

    PHRASE_OLD - Original XB program that loads in DF/80 Assembly programs - load time over 1 minute.

     

    PHRASE_NEW - Using the fantastic SYSTEX by Barry Boone - load time 10 seconds.

    This is super cool, but I can only get it to work some of the time. Do you know why that might be? Sometimes it loads up no problem, other times it says that it can't find the subprogram "sload." Have you had this issue too?

    • Like 1

    Editor Assembler

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

    Hey all,

     

    I just got the editor assembler cart with the manual. However, I do not have access to the diskettes. Does anyone know where I can find a link to a .dsk file of the files on those disks that I can run off of my nanoPEB?

     

    Thanks!

    Floppy Drive Questions

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

     

    There's tons of good disk games. :) If you are interested, let me know and I can mail you some of my game disks that I'm not using.

     

    A number of mine, tho, use Extended Basic so you may eventually want to consider picking that cart up as well.

     

    Edit: Since you asked specifically, some of my favorites are Cubit, Submarine Commander, the Scott Adams Adventure games (requires Adventure cart) and of course, Tunnels of Doom (requires ToD cart).

    Thanks, I just picked up extended BASIC, and I'm also trying to get a hold of the Editor/assembler and start learning assembly

    Floppy Drive Questions

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

    Hey all,

     

    I just acquired a side car floppy drive, but I don't have a 32k RAM expansion for it and I'm looking to mess around with assembly language. I do however have a nanoPEB.

     

    Now, as silly as this may sound, would it be possible to set up the floppy drive, AND the nanoPEB so that the nanoPEB would act as the 32K expansion, or would having the 3 emulated floppy drives and the real floppy drives make something go wrong?

     

    In addition to that, now that I have a real floppy drive, what are good floppy disk games out there?

     

    Thanks!

    TI 83/84

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted · Edited by CamTheBridge

    I was just curious if any of you 99ers had any experience programming on TI's calculators in addition to the 99. It could be because of my age, but my friends and I held these things dear and made all sorts of fun things on the calculator version of BASIC in high school.

     

    I'm curious to hear what y'all have to say!

    Getting a floppy drive

    in TI-99/4A Computers

    Posted

    I'm guessing you need a storage medium and are not just in the market to collect one.

     

    Unless you want to go virtual floppy. Is there a reason you want an actual physical floppy drive? (You have disks you want to access?).

     

    I think virtual floppies are the way to go if you don't have a PEB. If you did have a PEB with a floppy disk controller, I'd recommend a GoTek or HxC virtual floppy drive.

     

    Without a PEB, the only things I know of or can think of at the moment are nanoPEB which stores virtual floppy drives on a CF Card. OR wait until TiPi is ready which will allow you to use a Raspberry Pi as virtual floppy drives plus more. (easiest transfer from PC to TI via web browser interface, open files across the web, more to come as development continues...)

     

    If you have physical floppy disks you want access to, there are members here (including myself) that are willing to transfer those disks to virtual disk files for use in emulators or virtual floppy drives.

     

    EDIT: fixed some typos.

     

     

    I don't have any physical floppys, I'm more just really into how cool old storage media is. I LOVE using cassettes to store BASIC code, and I figured having a real floppy would be pretty fun too, but since its so expensive to aquire a drive I'll just go the more modern route

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