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What's left to emulate?


Casey

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Yes, 99/4B and 99/5 are certain to come ... one day ... dumps are there. I'd rather be interested in some more peripheral cards (e.g. disk controllers).

 

I have a TI Professional at home (or rather, due to space contraints, I moved it into my office and try to impress students with it). It is a 8088 machine (XT class), with a proprietary graphics card, and with no schematics that I know of. The fact that it was built by TI is the only point where it touches our world here.

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It's one thing to emulate hardware... but it's another to have any software to run on it to know if you got the emulation right. ;)

 

I say we move on to other 9900-based systems. I understand there's an anti-missile system and an attack chopper's control console - who has schematics? ;)

 

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29 minutes ago, Tursi said:

I say we move on to other 9900-based systems. I understand there's an anti-missile system and an attack chopper's control console - who has schematics? ;)

I also read somewhere back in the 1990's that the Space Shuttle used the TMS 9900 in it's navigation system, but I never was able to verify that.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 6/26/2019 at 6:53 PM, Tursi said:

It's one thing to emulate hardware... but it's another to have any software to run on it to know if you got the emulation right. ;)

 

 

good point. How would we know if we got the TI vaporware machines right?

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when I was in college the state of Georgia university system computers where TI mini-frames. I learned programming on them. I guess they where 9900 based? it was the mid to late 80s. first thing I ever programmed on was a TI teletype terminal. I wonder how you would do an emulated network of those things complete with teletype? 

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13 hours ago, hloberg said:

when I was in college the state of Georgia university system computers where TI mini-frames. I learned programming on them. I guess they where 9900 based? it was the mid to late 80s. first thing I ever programmed on was a TI teletype terminal. I wonder how you would do an emulated network of those things complete with teletype? 

There was a 4A version of the 941 terminal emulator software to connect to TI's employee bulletin board, back in the day. I think the filename was VDT.

That would be one way to do it - emulate the server, get a lot of serial ports somehow, hook up 4As with VDT!

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17 hours ago, jrhodes said:

How about the TI Magic Wand?

 

 

According to datamath.org it uses the TMS5220, also in the Speech Synthesizer. (That is a great web site by the way.) (Other chips: ROM is CD2228, microcontroller is C14007)

 

Mame source so far

 

There did exist an interface from the 4A to the Magic Wand's RJ11 jack, replacing the wand. The one that I saw was a few wires to the joystick and cassette ports. This was used to test drive the Magic Wand by sending bar code data. Going the other direction might be just as feasible.

 

The bar codes in the books begin with pitch/slope info (or code for loops) followed by allophone numbers. So the sounds you get on the Speaking Reader are much like what you can create with TE2 text-to-speech. Some of them have codes to do loops or multiple choice quizzes (it waits for you to scan the answer.)

 

There will be a display of TI speech toys at Fest 99/4ATX . Al Olson was a TI engineer who worked on some of them (esp Magic Wand) making plans to attend.

 

Another TI engineer from the Magic Wand team was Mike Read, who used to be known in 4A circles. Mike Read built a stand-alone Magic Wand Speaking Reader, using a TMS9995, I think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Here are some challenges:
Hex-Bus Wafertape Drive

Hex-Bus Rs232 Interface

Hex-Bus Video Interface

Sideport - Hex-Bus Interface for the 99/4(A)

Sideport - P-Code Interface

Sideport - Video Controller

Sideport - Speech Synthesizer with Speech Module Interface
PEB - Video Controller Card

PEB - IEEE-488 Bus Controller Card

PEB - EPROM Programmer Card

MBX

F18A Video Chip

Infrared Analog Joystick Support as planned for the 99/4 and supported by Monitor/Gpl system software.

CC 40+

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3 minutes ago, --- Ω --- said:

Why not add the TIPI. ?

Hmmm... Some people would like to see a Raspi running a TI emulation, but a TI emulation running a Raspi...  I mean, if we assume that the emulator host runs at least a 100 times as fast as the emulatee, you should not expect anything useful from emulating that class of hardware.

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23 minutes ago, mizapf said:

Hmmm... Some people would like to see a Raspi running a TI emulation, but a TI emulation running a Raspi...  I mean, if we assume that the emulator host runs at least a 100 times as fast as the emulatee, you should not expect anything useful from emulating that class of hardware.

I know, it's not lost on me, I have a twisted sense of humor and probably had one too many glasses of wine tonight (day off).  But in all fairness I did add the ? face.

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1 hour ago, Asmusr said:

One way to emulate the TIPI would be to emulate the DSR and the RPi GPIO only, and run the TIPI Python code on the host.

this is the easiest way as the python code doesn't care what its running on.. it would also help people develop for it without a ti set up

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1 hour ago, Asmusr said:

One way to emulate the TIPI would be to emulate the DSR and the RPi GPIO only, and run the TIPI Python code on the host.

 

With some affinity to nitpicking, I'd say that "emulate the DSR" is not quite the MAME idea of emulation. ;-) The way to go would be to fake a device that runs this DSR.

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