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Really Stupid Miner 2049er Question


TI-GAMER

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This is probably going to be a really stupid question but I have to ask.

I have a Miner 2049er Cartridge but the connector on the end is female unlike a regular cartridge that has a male connector. I did verify it is a TI-99 cart.

So how the heck does this cart work? The only plausible connection would be in the Speech Synth from what I can see but I hate to plug it in and fry the cart.

post-41001-0-73832500-1431061915_thumb.jpg

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This is probably going to be a really stupid question but I have to ask.

I have a Miner 2049er Cartridge but the connector on the end is female unlike a regular cartridge that has a male connector. I did verify it is a TI-99 cart.

So how the heck does this cart work? The only plausible connection would be in the Speech Synth from what I can see but I hate to plug it in and fry the cart.

 

All of a sudden the 'kick stand' on the bottom of the cart makes sense. I had seen pictures of this cart before, but now I know why the funky shape. Good post!

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The nice thing about the side port cartridges from the developer's standpoint was that you could use the DSR space at >4000, which let you utilize the console power-up routines to guarantee that your cartridge would run. Add the 32K space to that and you had a cartridge that could contain up to 40K of Assembly software--without bank switching. Even better was that it avoided the v2.2 console issues as well, so the side port cartridge was a really good idea. There are several different ones too: Miner 2049er and Espial (both TigerVision), Arcturus and Killer Caterpillar (both Exceltek), GROM Buster (Navarone and CorComp varieties), and the Hamsoft Module (Kantronics).

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Alyssa Milano is on my list...

I remember dumping this cartridge back in the day. I could not use the 32K memory or disk since the cartridge got in the way of the PEB. I wrote a small program to dump it by reading a few bytes at a time in Basic and saving it to cassette. When I reconnected the PEB, I read the data from tape and put it into the same memory location. It worked perfectly. I then saved it to disk and converted to a cartridge format. I don't remember that part but it might been CSAVE.

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  • 3 years later...

True, but the same could be said for the console too. Just run an emulator an save a lot of money and physical space. But part of a retro hobby is using the actual hardware. If I did not have to deal with carts and disks, I might actually play the games more, and that would remind me of how bad a lot of them really are. ?

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If you are not a 'collector', it's cheaper to buy a FinalGROM and get the program << HERE FOR FREE >> then you can get hundreds of other programs to run on the cart for free too!

Yeah, I can’t justify it, but the whole sidecar cartridge makes it pretty unique. Think I had it on floppy from a Graham Kracker export someone did back in the day.

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You play the side-cart game. The reason for using the side port is because when the 99/4A powers-on and scans for devices on the side-port, it gives any device it finds a chance to run any necessary setup code (in the device's ROM typically). This happens before the cartridge port is scanned and before the selection menu. The side-cart game just starts up and never returns back to the 99/4A's startup process like a good device driver does.

 

It was an attempt to prevent copying. Any cartridge plugged in never gets to run any code, and you can't plug in any device down-stream of the side-cart game. Of course this failed to protect the game, everything gets cracked, but some companies tried.

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