DavidC Posted April 16, 2020 Share Posted April 16, 2020 My FG arrived today, and I am blown away by the amount of stuff on the pre-loaded card. (Which I believe is downloadable from whtech) It has just about EVERYTHING!! So cool. RXB, XB 2.6, The different flavors of Fourth...the list goes on and on...THIS IS AWESOME!!! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JB Posted April 16, 2020 Share Posted April 16, 2020 23 hours ago, BillO said: Cool. It will be interesting to see what this machine can really do. The basic unit is almost useless, yet very easy on the eye (I'm a gearhead). I don't know what TI were thinking with their base BASIC and the limited RAM. I guess it was meant to be a teaser so you'd part with more money to get the stuff needed to make it useful. My understanding(as someone who was rather small when all this was happening) is that TI didn't actually WANT people developing software that took full advantage of the system. Not unless they paid TI for a developer's kit, and then paid TI again to manfacture the GROMs they would need for a cartridge. It was a good ways into the system's life before the platform was opened up with Extended BASIC and Editor/Assembler. Basically, TI wanted a "walled garden" where they were the sole publisher of software, and they made money on both hardware and software sales. This practice was terribly offensive to most software developers. And even after the platform was opened up they didn't really trust TI not to close it back down, like with a system revision that disabled booting from ROM-only cartridges... Forty years later... TI always was ahead of their time. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DuaneAL Posted April 17, 2020 Share Posted April 17, 2020 Thanks again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillO Posted April 19, 2020 Author Share Posted April 19, 2020 (edited) My FG arrived on Friday and I've been playing. There was a little disappointment though. First the case had plastic lumps on it and I could not insert it. After using a knife and sandpaper to re-shape the case I noticed that the LED was not lighting even though the cartridge seemed to be working. I opened it up and there was a 330 ohm SMD resistor missing. I was able to solder in a 1/8 metal film resistor and got the LED working. As a bonus I added a short cable with a barrel connector on it across the 5V side of the regulator in order to power my CF7+ so now I can dispense with he wall wart for the CF7+. So, it's quite amazing what the TI-99/4A becomes when you sandwich it between many thousands of times the processing power of the TMS9900. LOL! Edited April 19, 2020 by BillO 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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