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This is a work in progress.. will be happy to add anything missing - Greg A few bits of information, rules and guidelines on posting. Short links to our sub-forums: TI-99/4A Computers http://ti99.atariage.com TI-99/4A Development http://dev99.atariage.com Please read the AtariAge site guidelines which apply to and are enforced in our subs. Our sub-forums are divided to help cater to the varied interests in our beloved platform. The parent sub-forum, TI-99/4A Computers, contains general information and conversation regarding the TI-99/4A and its siblings, such as the 99/2, 99/8, CC-40, and BASICALCS. The sub-forum TI-99/4A Development is for conversations, information, announcements, etc. pertaining to programming, tinkering, or the development of software or hardware for these computers. This division is not intended to be a separation of the community but rather a way for those who have little interest in development but moreso in general discussions to focus their time on the fun-zone, while those who take more interest in the deep-down nitty-gritty and not so much general shenanigans to focus their attention just the same. The rest of us can spend all the time we want and will peruse both subs with reckless abandon. Insofar as development is concerned, once hardware or software has been completed or is at least ready for general consumption, an announcement should be made in the general TI-99/4A Computers forum for all to partake. Further development and inquiries should still be continued within the TI-99/4A Development sub-forum. The forum leader will move threads to a more appropriate forum. This may also be done by request should a thread be started in the wrong forum by accident or the trajectory changes from general to development or vice-versa. The forum leader will also merge identical threads started in both forums into a single thread in the proper forum. Per AtariAge guidelines, please refrain from posting identical threads in both sub-forums as way to ensure the topic gets viewed. Many people already browse both subs, and if your topic pertains more to development rather than general, or vice-versa, the thread should exist in the appropriate forum. As well, multiple threads created on the same topic in the same forum will be merged. Regular members can edit a post for 60 minutes after submission. This allows you to fix any issues you may notice with the post right away. Subscribers can edit posts for 30 days. In the Marketplace and Programming forums you can edit your posts indefinitely, since the flexibility of allowing editing of posts outweighs the potential abuse of the edit functionality. If you make a duplicate post in a thread, which can happen by accident or some unforeseen technical glitch, report the post by clicking on the "report" link at the bottom of the post and indicate in the report that the post is a duplicate. If you are not a subscriber, please help support AtariAge by using the eBay BBCodes ebay, ebayseller, and ebaystore when posting links to eBay! Click here for more information. Anything you would like to share with your fellow 99ers but is seriously off-topic for the forum may be posted in the official off-topic thread, located here To find the most popular threads click on sort by and select most popular. All of us are ready and willing to provide answers to your TI-99 questions if we can, some will just chime in if they cannot, and others will just lurk. If you have any questions specifically pertaining to the operation of our forums, please feel free inquire of the forum leader via Private Message (PM,) or one of the global moderators. BEFORE POSTING QUESTIONS PLEASE READ THE UPDATED TI-99/4A FAQ HERE: https://www.arcadeshopper.com/wp/ti-99-4a-faq/
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This forum has a lot of information hidden away in its depths. The repetition of the same questions indicates that locating that information is not as easy as it could be. Ideally I would like to create a metasearch so you could use one search box- but you would be deluged with possible answers and I don't have the resources anyway. So... I have created a page of searches for you to use. In some cases you need to prefix your search with "ti-99/4a" in quotes to focus the results on our favourite computer - I have noted this when especially relevant. How you use quotation marks is important in reducing unhelpful results - but overuse may cause you to miss something, so practice with varying search forms. Just putting lots of words without quotation marks is not usually useful and just one or two words may overwhelm you.. If I have omitted a resource rich web site (which does not require javascript!) do let me know.and I will update this offering. So- open this htm file in your browser and save it to your local machine where you can then open it at will. Have fun tisearch.htm
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I was pointed in the direction of this forum by some good folks over on Reddit. I have come into the possession of what seems to be a PAL release of Star Strike by Telegames. I have not been able to get much information about it, other than a few mentions, and its appearance in a few databases. http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-star-strike_7809.html and http://www.completeroms.com/dl/atari-2600/star-strike-telegames-pal-/1760 I've been provided with a little more information about Telegames and how they came to license the game, but putting a value on it has proven very difficult. There are no eBay listings that I have been able to find, let alone a finished auction. I am aware this game -even though, perhaps rare - might not necessarily be that valuable. I'm not an Atari collector, my preference lies with the PC and PS1/2 consoles for now, so this game would probably be part of a trade in the future. https://imgur.com/a/1XhNZel Thanks for your time.
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Do you have a favorite TI-99/4A related PDF file? Was there one newsletter, one project, one modification or one set of documentation that influenced you, blew you away or was memorable because of content, graphics or something else? Upload it or link to it! Share with us that one .PDF file! Maybe we'll all learn something or get blown away too. The plain fact is, there are so dang many files out there, having a head's up to the good stuff would be great.
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A couple weeks ago my local PBS station broadcast a show about the very first transatlantic telegraph line. Mostly it was about the financing and cable laying voyages and very little about the things a geek like me was interested in: the electrical characteristics of the cable and how fast they were able to transmit messages. Only by reviewing the transcript of the show, reading a Wikipedia article and other articles was I able to get the facts I wanted (and more). Here, then are some of the facts I acquired: - The first successful transatlantic cable was laid in 1858. - It stretched from Newfoundland to the coast of Ireland. - A separate cable from New York to Newfoundland was already laid a couple years prior to the 1858 cable. - The electricity was too weak at the far end of the cable and so Lord Kelvin invented the mirror galvanometer which could detect very slight voltage differences. - Reception was very poor despite the fact that hundreds of volts of electricity was applied at the source end of the cable. - It took two minutes to send the first character (or letter) across the cable. That is equal to 0.1 words a minute (and you thought your modem was slow ). - The first message on the cable, a message from Queen Victoria to U.S. President Buchanan, took over 17 hours to transmit. - At the source end of the cable over 500 volts were applied. In an attempt to improve performance, the voltage was increased until it reached 2,000 volts and the cable failed (this high voltage most likely broke down the insulation). - The 1858 cable only operated for 23 days. So that was it for the 1858 cable. When word spread that the cable failed, there was a tremendous reaction by the press and public. People hinted that the whole thing was a hoax (conspiracy theories in the 1850's, go figure). As a result, a committee of inquiry was formed to investigate the failure. The committee found a number of problems with the 1858 cable. Mostly it had to do with how the cable was designed and built. In fact, Cyrus West Field, the guy who spearheaded the 1858 cable, knew about the flaws but went ahead anyway. The committe also discovered that a lot of the problems with the cable had to do with a poor understanding of electricity. In fact, Wildman Whitehouse, the chief electrician on the 1858 cable, had a lot of hokey ideas about science and electricity and really didn't know what he was doing (he was an English surgeon before becoming involved in the 1858 cable - hardly the qualifications necessary to head such a project). A significant result from the inquiry was the recommendation for the definition of standardized units. Thus, the definition of Volts, Ohms, Ampheres and Watts were a direct result of this committee of inquiry. The most important contribution of the committee was the fact that it existed at all. It set a precedent for other inquiries into engineering failures that were yet to come including the sinking of the Titanic and the Challenger explosion. Nowadays, such inquiries are routine following disasters in an attempt to prevent such mistakes from repeating. It wasn't until 1866 before another transatlantic cable was attempted. The civil war, the inquiry and Cyrus Field's difficulty in garnering more finances were the main reasons for the delay. Some facts about the 1866 cable: - Cable manufacturing techniques and message sending methods improved considerably since 1858. - It could transmit up to 8 words a minute which is 50 times faster than the 1858 cable (still a LOT slower tha a 300 baud modem, which is about 360 words per minute). - The 1866 cable carried 1,000 messages per month, at up to ten dollars a word. - Once the 1866 cable became operational, Europe and America have been continously connected elecronically ever since (new cables became operational before the 1866 cable failed). - The 1866 cable, along with cables to the rest of Europe and Africa made London the communications center of the world. No less than 11 cables radiated from the city to connect it to the world. The lack of a repeater station is the main reason for the slow transmission speeds (kinda hard to put a working repeater under the ocean). It wasn't until the 20th century that transmission speeds could reach 120 words per minute. Many modern cables route through Iceland so that repeaters can amplify the incoming signals and improve performance. The first transatlantic telephone line wasn't attempted until 1956. It's a lot more difficult to transmit a voice signal across a transatlantic cable than a telegraph signal. The first transatlantic cable, labeled TAT-1 carried 36 channels - that's 36 simultaneous telephone calls. Each channel had a bandwidth of 4 KHz which could carry a human voce (but the sound was really tinny). Today, transatlantic cables are capable of transmitting in the Gigabit per second range, use fiberoptic technology and self healing ring topology. So, if you ever read an E-mail from a friend overseas or visit an overseas web site, keep these facts in mind.