Documents TI-99 - DOCs, Manuals, eBooks, Lost & Found

[MikeV]

The Asgard MDP. Some assembly is required. Hopefully someone will assemble a pdf.

Asgard MDP_Page_1-4.zip Asgard MDP_Page_5-8.zip Asgard MDP_Page_9-12.zip Asgard MDP_Page_13-17.zip Asgard MDP_Page_18-21.zip Asgard MDP_Page_22-23.zip

[MikeV]

By Not-Poly. BITD, the wife really disliked this one. (It was a bit obnoxious!) Some assembly required.

Texas Light Shooter_Page_1-3.zip Texas Light Shooter_Page_4-6.zip Texas Light Shooter_Page_7.tiff

[MikeV]

Horizon MDP. A great hardware addition for the TI. PDF hopefully?

Horizon Mouse_Page_1-7.zip Horizon Mouse_Page_8-11.zip Horizon Mouse_Page_12-16.zip Horizon Mouse_Page_17-22.zip

[MikeV]

Sub-routines. I'm surprised the last uploaded!

STAR.pdf The Brain.pdf

[Omega-TI]

1 hour ago, MikeV said:

I experimented with Fred's print spooler (HDX?) -to brothers printer - with mixed results as well. It is particular about settings and fixed fonts, but then the old TI compatible printers were as well. Thanks for reminding me - the nanopeb has a serial port which might work as well (I guess TIPI is newer and better?)

Newer is not always better (depending on the task).  If you have an old dot matrix printer, the CF7 or an RS-232 in a P-Box would be optimal.  I remember the days when we could print long ass banners, now a thing of the past to most of us.  The TIPI might be able to fill the gap on a modern printer with some things, but I'm not sure the if the PDF output is exactly the same size.  The output of CSGD, at least they way I used to use it was with single-wide tractor feed labels, I do not remember if it was capable of two wide or three wide sheets.

 

I modified it to work with three drives for record keeping of order information, time & date via the Triple Tech card and to calculate profit margin per order among other things.  Back in the day before everybody and his brother had a computer and a printer I used to buy massive quantities of labels at Costco and print thousands upon thousands of customized labels for people and some businesses.  I think I drove my wife nuts with the sound of the Dot Matrix printer going for hours on end.

[Omega-TI]

1 hour ago, MikeV said:

Horizon MDP. A great hardware addition for the TI. PDF hopefully?

... okay, here ya go.

Horizon Mouse.pdf

[MikeV]

12 hours ago, INVISIBLE said:

... okay, here ya go.

Horizon Mouse.pdf 1.59 MB · 3 downloads

Thank you! There are a couple of others if you get the time. How did you get the files down to 1.6 MB? My original was about 7 MB? (Obviously something I need to learn.)

[MikeV]

13 hours ago, INVISIBLE said:

Back in the day before everybody and his brother had a computer and a printer I used to buy massive quantities of labels at Costco and print thousands upon thousands of customized labels for people and some businesses.  I think I drove my wife nuts with the sound of the Dot Matrix printer going for hours on end.

When I get some time I need to explore printer options. From your post it does not sound like there is one single solution as yet. We used to print the mailing list (labels) for the UG just as you described.

 

Yes, there was a lot of teeth grinding here with the Epson as well. (Though not as bad as with that Light Shooter!)

[+Schmitzi]

one more, with OCR but bigger file

 

Horizon Mouse-OCR.pdf

 

 

[Omega-TI]

5 minutes ago, Schmitzi said:

one more, with OCR but bigger file

 

Horizon Mouse-OCR.pdf 3.09 MB · 0 downloads

 

 

Excellent!  I decided to compress it I got it down to over 50%.

 

 

Horizon Mouse-OCR- (compressed).pdf

[+Schmitzi]

Please give e input for my output

 

What is better, opening a PDF with 1 page, or full size ?

 

Examples:

 

Horizon Mouse--OCR-Open-1-Page.pdf

 

Horizon Mouse--OCR-Open-Full-Screen.pdf

 

 

[+Schmitzi]

3 minutes ago, INVISIBLE said:

Excellent!  I decided to compress it I got it down to over 50%.

 

 

Horizon Mouse-OCR- (compressed).pdf 1.33 MB · 1 download

 

For me, there is too much loss of quality, especially if you make a reprint.

 

 

[Omega-TI]

2 minutes ago, Schmitzi said:

Please give e input for my output

 

What is better, opening a PDF with 1 page, or full size ?

 

Examples:

 

Horizon Mouse--OCR-Open-1-Page.pdf 3.09 MB · 0 downloads

 

Horizon Mouse--OCR-Open-Full-Screen.pdf 3.09 MB · 0 downloads

 

 

For the initial opening I like the Open-1-Page version, but I usually read them Full Screen.  I'm not sure it really make much difference once it's loaded because most people will adjust the size to their viewing preference with the CTRL key and mouse wheel.

[Omega-TI]

4 minutes ago, Schmitzi said:

 

For me, there is too much loss of quality, especially if you make a reprint.

 

 

Hmmm, I'll have to investigate that.  I've never really noticed any on-screen difference, and the manuals I print have always seemed to look presentable.  Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

[+Schmitzi]

5 minutes ago, INVISIBLE said:

Hmmm, I'll have to investigate that.  I've never really noticed any on-screen difference, and the manuals I print have always seemed to look presentable.  Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

 

just one example, you can see it around the letters and anything else:

(Zoom in some more, as shown here)

 

 

 

[+Schmitzi]

11 minutes ago, INVISIBLE said:

For the initial opening I like the Open-1-Page version, but I usually read them Full Screen.  I'm not sure it really make much difference once it's loaded because most people will adjust the size to their viewing preference with the CTRL key and mouse wheel.

 

For me, I absolutely prefer the 1-page opening, as it gives an immediately overview of the cover or first side,

and you can immediately scroll with this overview exactly page by page through the doc,

and on the landing page, I zoom in.

 

The other way around, you see half of the first side, begin to scroll and scroll and scroll....

 

[blackbox]

MikeV:  Smaller TIF files:

I notice that your .tiff files are in rgb mode at just 96dpi (meta data in the file).

Your TIFF files report that they are using LZW lossless compression (good!).

You can up the DPI a lot and keep the files small- if you don't need colour, change to "greyscale" if you can.  Even better is to change the image mode to "indexed" with 16 or 8 colours.

PDF files are generally compressed, usually not lossless.  The dpi is also sometimes reduced which takes away some detail.   Once detail has gone it has gone, which is why I prefer archiving at fairly high dpi.  Lower dpi and added compression, and maybe image rescaling, makes for smaller files- but at a cost which will vary depending on the original image.

Adding OCR to a PDF makes it searchable and adds a little to the file size.  You can OCR text, and then "reset" it with a modern clean font, and "print" it as a pdf which will be a smaller file size - but it won't be a scan of the original...

You just need to choose what you need most.  If the archive is at a high dpi - users can make up their own minds and process to meet their needs.

best wishes   s

[MikeV]

On 5/2/2020 at 11:37 AM, blackbox said:

MikeV:  Smaller TIF files:

I notice that your .tiff files are in rgb mode at just 96dpi (meta data in the file).

Your TIFF files report that they are using LZW lossless compression (good!).

You can up the DPI a lot and keep the files small- if you don't need colour, change to "greyscale" if you can.  Even better is to change the image mode to "indexed" with 16 or 8 colours.

PDF files are generally compressed, usually not lossless.  The dpi is also sometimes reduced which takes away some detail.   Once detail has gone it has gone, which is why I prefer archiving at fairly high dpi.  Lower dpi and added compression, and maybe image rescaling, makes for smaller files- but at a cost which will vary depending on the original image.

Adding OCR to a PDF makes it searchable and adds a little to the file size.  You can OCR text, and then "reset" it with a modern clean font, and "print" it as a pdf which will be a smaller file size - but it won't be a scan of the original...

You just need to choose what you need most.  If the archive is at a high dpi - users can make up their own minds and process to meet their needs.

best wishes   s

Thank you very much for the tips! Another expressed the same concerns. For some reason I thought higher resolution meant larger files. They were scanned to pdf's and then converted to tiff or png format for touch-up (and apparently rgb'd) with paint. I will experiment and will have to redo some uploads. Thanks again. MikeV.

[blackbox]

Here is a little demonstration- the image of high and lo res below is a jpg to demonstrate the loss of detail - the clear text is scanned at 600dpi and the rather fuzzy text is at 100dpi.  The original text is quite small. Which do you prefer?

I have also attached the raw scans for comparison:

1. 100 dpi rgb scan, full colour, not edited or adjusted. Normal tif lzw compression- size 35.8kb

2. 600 dpi, scanned as greyscale, levels adjusted to increase contrast (you can also use curves), then image converted to indexed format with 8 colours and normal lzw compressed tif. Size 33.7kb. The level adjustment takes out the fine detail of the paper grain by increasing the white, and darkens the black to make it clearer.

The 100 dpi rgb image was 35.8kb, whereas the sharper 600dpi image was 33.7kb- eg the 600dpi file is smaller than the 100dpi file.

Using the indexed mode is always worth trying if there are not too many colours- but it is not very good on the more artistic colour covers of some manuals as details can be lost. If you don't need colour, greyscale mode  also makes a smaller file than rgb but your graphic editing program needs to save the image as greyscale- if you save an all grey image in the rgb format, it stays the same size.  Look for something like "image mode" in the editor options or save as dialogues. (I use the free "GIMP" image editor).

If you can avoid the scan to pdf and just scan direct to tif it may be sharper.

s

tifrgb.tif tifgrey.tif

[blackbox]

Two zip files of clean hires (480/600dpi) TIF images of the manual for:
WEIGHT CONTROL AND NUTRITION  PHM 3021
for you to read, ocr, pdf or print...
all 88 pages, the first part at 480 dpi but the appendices are smaller print so I upped the dpi to 600.
Added a function strip (not really necessary...).
And as this is a TI99/4 manual, and the inside back cover was blank, there is an alternate IBC  with the keys to use with the TI99/4a.
And as this is very American, the zip includes a two page pdf translating much of the American measures and words into English.

After all that heavy work, I am moving to something lighter before going on to Turbo Pasc 99:

First, in this post, and already posted in another thread for keyboard strips, a special strip for the unreleased module TI SCRABBLE- the key assignments chosen mean that a strip was very much in mind.  You can just use the strip if you want or there is also a two page text manual pdf.

 

Secondly, I am now working on the unreleased Tennis module, having now seen the "documentation" (!) produced by Databiotics and noting they didn't mention... or... , I can do better than that, using a document from "GAMES FOR TEXPAC BBS" many years ago. This game is front paged as "1983 NICESOFT" and "TENNIS" but seen listed as MICRO TENNIS, and US OPEN TENNIS and PRO TENNIS and even LOVE TENNIS.  The Nice is from the French town Nice where TI France were. I have also seen two French names associated with the program who founded MICRO MANIA a major French software retailer founded 1983, who have a "World Tennis" program for many platforms.

weightcontrol_pt1.zip weightcontrol_pt2.zip SCRABBLESTRIP.tif Scrabble.pdf

[blackbox]

An "original" manual for an unreleased module, including the bits Databiotics failed to mention when they released a copy.

This game is front paged as "1983 NICESOFT" and "TENNIS"
The Nice is from the French town Nice where TI France were
 
 This game has been listed as:
 MICRO TENNIS
 US OPEN TENNIS
 PRO TENNIS
 LOVE TENNIS.
 
The title screen just says TENNIS.
 
(The frg .bin files are mtennisc and mtennisd - Micro Tennis.)
 
Joysticks required, speech synthesiser optional.
 
 This is not a scan but an original searchable PDF- the screen grabs were TI native resolution as PNGs.
 
 Most of the text came from TEXPAC BBS many (many) years ago.  
 The content fitted very neatly into an 8 page standard size manual.

Tennis_Nicesoft_manual.pdf

[Omega-TI]

^

^

Very clean and well done! (Linked!)

[+mizapf]

7 hours ago, blackbox said:

Two zip files of clean hires (480/600dpi) TIF images of the manual for:
WEIGHT CONTROL AND NUTRITION  PHM 3021
for you to read, ocr, pdf or print...

 

I think this just on time in those pandemic days with calories overdose due to insufficient exercise, and fat belly as result.

[+Schmitzi]

I am converting all scans that blackbox has posted, to PDFs, at the moment.

I go from A through Z, and ended at "Hangman" tonight.

It will take much time. So, if somebody does the same, maybe we negotiate,

not to do double work, or just start backwards from Z

 

I try to post A - H later, anybody knows if there is a limit, in megabytes,

how much data I can post here ? (I mean "limit per post", the PDFs are all smaller than 10 MB)

 

Edited May 6, 2020 by Schmitzi

[+Schmitzi]

285 MB PDFs (A-H-angman)