+retroclouds Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 (edited) ok, folks. This probably is kinda off-topic. But it's Sunday afternoon and I felt a bit bored. So I decided to finally put some stickers on my PEB. You can see the results here. I like the black invader (well he's from Berzerk anyway ). It kinda puts a stylish note to the serious Expansion System. I put 2 big ones on the left and right side and a small one on the front. The good thing is I got these (and a lot more) at IKEA for a mere $10 Edited July 29, 2013 by retroclouds 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+retroclouds Posted July 28, 2013 Author Share Posted July 28, 2013 This is how the collection looks like. Check here http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/90228174/ or at your local IKEA (should be worldwide right?) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sometimes99er Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 Nice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 Dude, that system looks BRAND NEW! I'm green with envy! BTW - What kind of drives are those? I've never seen them before and they look great in that box too! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobertLM78 Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 Dude, that system looks BRAND NEW! I'm green with envy! BTW - What kind of drives are those? I've never seen them before and they look great in that box too! It sure does look nice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+retroclouds Posted July 29, 2013 Author Share Posted July 29, 2013 Thanks. The drives you see on the pictures are Shugart floppy drives. Actually I was still a kid in the 80's and my dad built me a cage where the 2 drives fit in. The cage was then mounted into the PEB. Actually it was his PEB although I used it most of the time. I still remember when we picked up the drives. We had to drive for about 3 hours to get to the electronics store that got them. Oh the joy as I was all excited. Yeah, I try to keep the PEB in good order. It is one of the things I treasure a lot in memory of my dad. I also have a second PEB with a regular TI drive. That is one I want to use for doing some customizing. Anyway, the nice thing about the Shugart drives it that they are not as loud as the regular TI floppy drives. They also offer twice the capacity compared to the standard TI drives. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 I always get a charge out of seeing other peoples TI systems as they are all different in some way or another. In fact they can change quite a bit over the years as well. For example this was my first configuration in 1985 it took up a lot of space and I had to downsize when our first child was born. It was worth it! Some of the best memories of my life are of my son beating the crap out of me in Duke Nukem! So, I understand your fond memories of your Dad & the TI. And just a couple of years later it looked like this. This was by far the ‘coolest’ my TI system ever looked, but I had to downsize again when our second and last child was born. When I got out of the TI my system looked almost like this. This photo was taken before the external drive 3 & 4 was added as well as the mouse. Here the TI no longer had a room of its own, but a small corner in the master bedroom. UPDATE (As Promised) Now it's on the desk and get's even more use than ever before! Thanks for sharing your system, it was by far one of the cleanest systems I’ve seen yet. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 Hm! History shots! That sounds fun! I don't have any pictures of my earliest setups, but, they were generally temporary set ups in front of the family TV. This was my setup in Summerland BC, from 88-89. I would get black and white TVs from the flea market (they would go fuzzy after a year or two of use). The red thing is a stick-on clock, so I could watch the time. Sadly not in the picture, taped up on the wall above there are printouts like "Real computer programmers DOs and DON'T" and "Care of Floppy Disks". Still had the single 90k drive at this point, and 32k, but no RS232. The large joystick was hacked onto the TI cable, the other TI joystick was later replaced with a Colecovision joystick. There's an Apple floppy in the disk case, but I can't remember if I was using it at school or reformatted it for the TI. It was on this setup that I eventually got my first printer, my first modem, ran my first BBS, and earned my first $200 phone bill for calling Texaments in New York. I coded my first assembly programs there, and released "Berzark" and "Centiped" on the BBS - assembly clones of Berzerk and Centipede. Sadly I don't have copies of them anymore. This setup was just about 6 months from 1989-1990 till I went off to Basic Training, in my first home away from my parents. I finally had a spare console, and I pulled my first 24 hour coding session. I started Super Space Acer, and completed my first C99 programs - Super Sled Acer and Waterville Rescue (both are on my webpage). The white on the fronts of some keys was there so I could mark BBS-useful key presses like Control-Period for Escape. It was 1991 before I saw my TI again, having finished basic and trades training, been posted to Ottawa, and having to wait for my stuff to be shipped. In this shot you can see the printer wired up with a hacky cable (it was originally a Joytalk serial cable, then modified for the full RS232 card, then modified again to be parallel - the printer supported all these modes). That's a VCR on top of the PEB - it wasn't integrated but as I only had the one display (finally color!), it was my TV watching device too. At that desk I interacted with the Ottawa TI User group BBS (looks like a file transfer on the screen), wrote an audio digitizer demo (1-bit, used the cassette port), and started the FlipSide BBS software (on my web page). Originally it was to be a terminal program that used the 80 column text routines for bitmap mode I'd played with, but I abandoned that idea and made a BBS instead. (Jeff Brown picked the concept up and developed the idea far beyond into the magnificent Term80). I also finished and released Super Space Acer here - it was reviewed (badly) in Micropendium, getting 2.5 stars, and I had a grand total of 1 sale from the advertising I did while here. Eventually I moved on into my own little apartment in downtown Ottawa - I was three blocks from the Parliament buildings. This was my TI's home for about 4 years. I didn't produce anything too interesting here, as I was starting to play with other systems (Apple 2, Atari 800XL, Atari ST, and eventually Amiga 2000). But I did use a spare console to run FlipSide BBS, and it ran here for nearly the entire time. Eventually the system had three floppy drives (online games, one download, and message bases), and two RAMdisks (the BBS and message bases). (It also eventually had a 12 foot keyboard cable that I used to sit back on my couch while I typed on it). It was frequently busy, and we had a good run! Many people remotely mistook it for a PC BBS, as it was 80-column native internally and ran fairly quickly, except for a little lag on the mechanical floppies. Most of the data and message bases were on the RAMdisks, which were easily as fast as a PC hard drive. (I even watched people attempt PC-based buffer overruns against it.) I put the TI away for a while after that, but I brought it back out in '94 just before I left the armed forces and worked a little bit on Super Space Acer 2, but I never got much past the title sequence. (I used Extended BASIC to generate an animated title with large scaling text, though, I was proud of that. XB just generated the data files for the assembly because it was easier to write the scaling code in BASIC then let it run.) So in '95 I was back at my Grandma's place in a tiny town called Hedley BC, here I was using an Amber monitor borrowed from a friend who was an Apple 2 user. I had pretty much adopted my Amiga 2000 at this point as my main machine, but I still liked to play with the TI. Still, it did go away a bit after that, the next time I moved I replaced the Amiga with my first PC. The TI got set up again in 2000 when I moved down Hayward California working for a telephony company. This was when I started thinking about interfacing a co-processor of some sort as a file manager. That led to my Linux project which it now looks like someone else may do first. (Hey, works for me!!) Another place, another setup. This time I discovered blue LEDs. I also did the PEB PC power supply replacement. The TI went away again for a few years, coming back out more or less for good in 2004. At this point it was more of a project box... I embedded an ITX PC into a TI case here, for instance. Thus the lack of an actual TI console in this photo... But there are mini embedded Ethernet boards on top of the PEB there as part of my first experiments in getting an Ethernet interface on the machine. Eventually I moved into a townhouse that I bought with my partner, and the TI got a new "permanent" home. This place is where I messed around creating the keyboard controller with an AVR, and built one of Thierry's IDE cards, among other minor plays. The TI was rarely fully set up after I moved out of there 3-4 years later, although it was always close to power. I don't have pictures of the setups, but in Florida I messed with a 9928 VDP, and then back in California again where I built the Linux prototype cart that I showed at the Chicago TI Faire a few years back. In those cases the PEB was usually tucked away, disconnected, and I just worked with the console, loose. Currently, though, I'm down in Burbank, and gave myself lots of project space. So the TI is set up again, right beside my PC. And, just for kicks, I /also/ have a TI computer set up in my "virtual home" on Second Life. Hehe.. that was fun to dig through.. though I'm way late for bed now... 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 Awesome walk down memory lane Tursi! GREAT POST!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RXB Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 My old TI setup ran two TI upper and lower on the desk so I could print out the Source on one computer while I compiled GPL on the other for RXB. Bad wiring in the house made the lights dim when I fired them up. People that came over stepped back. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S1500 Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 I love seeing all these setup pics from yesteryear. Wish I could find mine from the mid-late 80s. This is like a yesteryear pictures of reddit's /r/battlestations 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unhuman Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 No disrespect, but your invader is more Berzerk. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 I love seeing all these setup pics from yesteryear. Wish I could find mine from the mid-late 80s. This is like a yesteryear pictures of reddit's /r/battlestations Oh why oh why did you tell me about this! Do you realize I've been drooling all over my keyboard for the last hour looking at other peoples systems! That http://imgur.com/r/battlestations site is fantastic eye candy. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+retroclouds Posted July 29, 2013 Author Share Posted July 29, 2013 (edited) No disrespect, but your invader is more Berzerk. Ofcourse you are right, but this is the sticker I like most Unfortunately there's no Berzerk game for the TI-99/4A. At least not that I know of. Guess it's time that sometimes99er goes hacking TI invaders again. This time doing "Bezerk Invaders" EDIT: I also adjusted the thread title. You knever know Edited July 29, 2013 by retroclouds 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 Unfortunately there's no Berzerk game for the TI-99/4A. At least not that I know of. Shamus is about the closest I've seen to Bezerk for the TI. The Trash-80 had 'Robot Attack' clone (and it spoke too). Here is that version... Fast foreward to 1:00. I really amazed that no one did Bezerk for the TI as it WAS a popular game. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 I really amazed that no one did Bezerk for the TI as it WAS a popular game. I did one and released it to Texaments, or at least I think I released it. Sadly no copies seem to have survived. Berzerk was one of my favorites! It wasn't very technically impressive, it was all character based, but it was fast and played well enough. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Retrospect Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 (edited) I love Berzerk ... and Frenzy! The TI could technically do just as good as the ColecoVision version .... I think? edit! OH MAN! I had ROBOT ATTACK for my TRS-80 Model 1 .... waaay back in '85! .... it was on a floppy-tape (Aculab in the UK made the drives for them) Speech and sound effects came out through a little blue transistor radio I had wired up to the Trash! Tursi - Your photo's ..... second picture from the top .... Freddy Kruegar glove on the wall ?! Edited July 29, 2013 by Retrospect 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Lee Stewart Posted July 30, 2013 Share Posted July 30, 2013 ok, folks. This probably is kinda off-topic. Not possible!—It's your topic!! ...lee 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted July 30, 2013 Share Posted July 30, 2013 Tursi - Your photo's ..... second picture from the top .... Freddy Kruegar glove on the wall ?! Hehe... yep. Made from those tinfoil/cardboard lids that you used to get on Chinese takeout containers (I got a stack of them from work ). I was a big fan back in the day. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+acadiel Posted July 31, 2013 Share Posted July 31, 2013 (edited) Sorry, no TI photos here, but the earliest ones I have are of me (somewhat geeky ones, I might add) with my Amigas. December 1991, with my A500. Notice the TI printer below, which was actually the only printer I used for a while. June 1993 - my Amiga 600 (right after I graduated high school): Fall 1993, first semester in seminary: Spring 1994: My Amiga 600 and my new Amiga 1200.... 1995 - Second year of seminary. Yes, the glasses were overkill. I'm somewhat embarrassed by this picture today. Oh yeah... the A1200 got on the front page of the newspaper in summer of 1995 in Louisiana. Again, with the embarrassing glasses. The guy didn't name the TI-99/4A by name (I made sure to tell him what it was)... and, the network was a bunch of serial ports (over phone wire, I might add), with which we used a switch box and Terminus on the Amigas. Sister's room had the A600, my room had the A1200, and we had an A500 in my brothers' room, and we could stealthily talk to each other. Might have another few pictures of the Amiga laying around (or even... gasp.. the Toshiba 400CS laptop I moved to in Spring 1997), but those are for another day. 1983-1991 was a good run for me and my TI-99/4A, and 1991-1997 was a good run for the Amiga. Moved to Wintel systems from 1997-2003, and have primarily used my Mac systems from 2003-present (longest run of any type system I've ever used, 10 years.) Jon Edited July 31, 2013 by acadiel 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+acadiel Posted July 31, 2013 Share Posted July 31, 2013 Sorry I crashed your topic, retroclouds :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S1500 Posted July 31, 2013 Share Posted July 31, 2013 Battlestations sure have changed over the years. Less books, floppy disks & "boxes" of peripherals compared to yesteryear. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+InsaneMultitasker Posted July 31, 2013 Share Posted July 31, 2013 (edited) December 1991, with my A500. Notice the TI printer below, which was actually the only printer I used for a while. June 1993 - my Amiga 600 (right after I graduated high school): These desk and hutch combinations must have been popular. I had exactly the same variety and up until my recent move, I still had the desk serving as a test bench for my Geneve. The hutch was damaged during the winter (moisture/salt/mold) and had to be destroyed. The desk is now in my mom's garage 1400 miles away. I wrote many a program and school report sitting in fromt of mine. I do not have pictures (that I know of) but I took my TI motherboard, power supply, and speech synth out of their cases, then suspended them with picture hangers from the back of the desk. The flex cable was also suspended and TI Extended BASIC was my cartridge of choice. Most everything could be run from XB or via FunnelWeb or 'cart simulation loaders' so I had little need to change carts. I used a ribbon cable to connect the motherboard to the keyboard (still mounted in the case, which was MUCH lighter now) so I had a "laptop" keyboard that was mobile within the limits of the cable itself. Ahh.... the memories. The picture hangers are still present on the back of the desk today and my speech synth has yet to find its way back into the case Thanks for sharing the pics. Edited July 31, 2013 by InsaneMultitasker Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted July 31, 2013 Share Posted July 31, 2013 Battlestations sure have changed over the years. Less books, floppy disks & "boxes" of peripherals compared to yesteryear. Yeah! I agree 100%. I sure do not miss all the cables that were required to hook everything together. WiFi RULES! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+retroclouds Posted July 31, 2013 Author Share Posted July 31, 2013 Sorry I crashed your topic, retroclouds :) Thanks for sharing the pictures and no need to feel sorry It's cool to see what systems you guys had in the past. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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