TonyRowell

on vacation at the moment but I'll have a look to see if I have a copy when I get home

TI was quite close to IBM, their joint venture brought about the first token ring chipsets

yes, existed only for the very first batch of silicon

as long as you wanted a stack that grew towards high memory they were fairly painless. We used to use the workspace to make fast routines for things, when you entered you could have all your registers pre-loaded with useful constants, pointers etc, overlapping workspaces was always "fun" just needed lots of coffee to hand :). the BLWP calling mechanism was always handy for passing inline parameters too, not something you get with other architectures, BL was abused in a similar way to save space JMPR0 MOV R11,R2 GET TABLE ADR * * NEXT INSTRUCTION INSERTED TO OVERCOME PROBLEM WITH * ODD ADDRESS GENERATION (WITH TMS9980 AND 81 PROCESSORS) * CLR R1 * JMPR01 MOVB *R11+,R1 GET DISPLACEMENT, DONE? JEQ JMPR02 Y - INSTRUCTION FOLLOWING TABLE CB R0,*R11+ N - CODE FOUND? JNE JMPR01 N - KEEP LOOKING SRA R1,7 Y - POSITION A R1,R2 ADD DISPLACEMENT B *R2 GOTO ROUTINE * * BYTE OPCODE NOT FOUND - RETURN TO INSTRUCTION * IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE TABLE * JMPR02 INC R11 MOVE TO NEXT LINE RT used to jump +/- 128 words based on R0 MSB used as in * * HANDLE TEXT CONTROL CHARACTERS * CNTRL BL @JMPR0 ;DO JUMP ON R0 (USES R1,R2) CJUMP BYTE HT-CJUMP/2,>09 HT - CURSOR RIGHT BYTE BS-CJUMP/2,>08 BS - CURSOR LEFT BYTE LF-CJUMP/2,>0A LF - CURSOR DOWN BYTE VT-CJUMP/2,>0B VT - CURSOR UP BYTE FF-CJUMP/2,>0C FF - CLEAR SCREEN & HOME BYTE CR-CJUMP/2,>0D CR - CURSOR BEGINING OF LINE BYTE FS-CJUMP/2,>1C FS - CURSOR ON BYTE GS-CJUMP/2,>1D GS - CURSOR OFF BYTE RS-CJUMP/2,>1E RS - CURSOR HOME DATA 0

It might help you understand some of the strange and apparently contradictory decisions TI made back then if you knew that internally TI operated as several distinct and separate businesses. The semiconductor group was just interested in selling chips, the DSG? group was only interested in selling minicomputers and the home computer group only interested in the 99/4A. Semiconductor group wanted the 99000 as as faster generation of the 9900, the minicomputer group liked that as a cost down on building the minicomputers but was only interested in running it with loads of wait states (can't have the cheap version outperforming their cash cow main product 990/10, 990/12). The non-cooperation between groups was everywhere, our 990/10 had a pair of T50's (washing machine sized 50MB multi-platter disks) and we obtained a pair of T200's - (massive 200MB lol) but they sat idle for 18 months because DSG wouldn't sell the semiconductor group the controller card because they hag brought the drives from an unofficial source on the cheap. The semiconductor group would love to put the 9900 family in a home computer and "do it right" but couldn't as home computers was another groups territory. Sooooo ... I was one of the developers of the Cortex home computer, published as a series of articles in the magazine Electronics Today International, developed in our own time this was an unofficial official project to get the family out into the public. Logistically the company Powertran handled the distribution and ETI the publicity. Did you know that the first 9995 chips had a cru bit to enable/disable the internal ram? Great in a ram based system where you could disable the internal ram, write stuff in the same location and then re-enable the internal ram, your code/data was now safely hidden and inaccessible :)

Software, probably some Mag tape reels and 8" floppies, I have no means of reading them now. I have a vague recollection that one of the tapes has the TIP compiler source on but I could be wrong. Manuals, quite a bit, anything you know you are short of?

for a few years I worked as a contractor for a company called Seismograph Services developing their DWS & MWS seismic recording systems for use on oil surveys. The MWS system used a 99000 based board with 2M of ram (special double high DIL sockets to take 2 dram DIL devices on top of each other, with a slight horizontal offset). It ran a custom version of the FS990 operating system that was used on the 990/4. We added support for hard drives, tape drives, keyboard with 2 line LCD, 610 memory mapper. Using the FP macrostore instructions we developed a complex maths package as the equipment had to do a lot of FFT type calculations and performance was critical. We did some insane stuff in that package like sliding the WP up and down a few words to move the FP accumulator (R0/R1) into "other" registers during sub calculations, quicker than moving the actual register contents and still accessible as registers just differently numbered registers, really messed with your mind during debugging

sorry, finger (or brain) trouble. TMX/TMP were pre TMS prefixes indicating devices that were pre qualification status and nothing to worry about, it's e-sample (engineering sample) marked devices you need to be a bit more cautious about

thanks

I realise this thread is old but there again the 99000 is way older. I used to work for TI and have worked with 99000s after leaving TI . From what I can remember (which isn't terribly reliable), TMS & TMP prefixes designate devices produced before the part has completed full qualification (takes months) but are otherwise identical to the TMS part. 99000 devices were only available to the group making the 99/10A, the only devices gennerally available were the 99105 & 99110 (99120 never produced) and were identical silicon. 99110s were hard to come by for a long time and we ran 99105s with external macrostore containing TI supplied code as 99110 equivalents as we needed the floating point instructions. I think the supply issue with 99110s was down to a yeild issue.