[HN Gopher] A collection of modern games for the TI-99/4A ___________________________________________________________________ A collection of modern games for the TI-99/4A Author : wsc981 Score : 124 points Date : 2021-09-18 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (tigameshelf.net) (TXT) w3m dump (tigameshelf.net) | donio wrote: | The source code for the Jetpac clone written in Forth is | available here: | | https://atariage.com/forums/topic/241846-new-game-project-je... | | https://atariage.com/forums/applications/core/interface/file... | compsciphd wrote: | if I remember correctly, TI had a forth development environment | for the 99/4a (TI-Forth). | abecedarius wrote: | Never heard of it, but I used a third-party system called | Wycove Forth, back in the 80s. It was unimpressive by today's | standards but fun enough for teenaged me. | vincent-manis wrote: | I had a TI 99/4A back in the 80s. TI Logo was pretty good (the | company had been interested in Logo for some years). The system | architecture was really nice, and for the time, the 9900 | microprocessor was really elegant. | | What doomed the system was TI's vision of a closed architecture, | with software distributed on cartridges on which TI would make a | rip-roaring profit. When I read about this vision, I put my | system up for sale, and sold it a few days before TI announced | they were getting out of the "home computer" market. | | I've never known much about TI's internal workings, but I've | always imagined that the company, at least at that time, had | excellent engineers and really clueless management. | wsc981 wrote: | Performance-wise I understood that their BASIC interpreter ran | atop an interpreter in another language, which made BASIC quite | slow. This at least seems to have been a questionable idea. | | But I liked my TI-99/4A and it got me into programming (with | help from my father). | endlos wrote: | I totally did not expect this on HN. | | Turns out the TI 99/4A has a thriving community and homebrew | scene, with two members in particular being exceptionally | productive. | | Those homebrow games created are even of at least an order of | magnitude higher quality than what was available in the 80s. | arcadeshopper wrote: | There are many new developers making games, utilities, new | versions of languages, a GCC compiler patch to output 9900 | code, a bunch of really cool modern hardware solutions | including the TIPI that provides a modern hard disk and | internet connectivity via a raspberry pi. and the F18A VDP | replacement is on this and many other systems to get VGA out. | more info: https://www.arcadeshopper.com/wp/ti-99-4a-faq/ | MichaelMoser123 wrote: | Here is a list of 99/4a emulators | https://www.99er.net/emul.shtml One of these emulators is on | github https://github.com/tursilion/classic99 - in active | development. | | I had the luck of owning a TI99/4A as a kid; it had a very rich | Basic, with the 16k extension cartridge you even had sprites | and a synthesizer. I have made some 2d game stuff with pygame | recently, and for me it felt as if I got back to this old | machine... (here is this stuff, for the record: | https://github.com/MoserMichael/pygamewrap ) | chasil wrote: | TI Basic lacked peek and poke, so no access to assembler was | available with the base unit, unlike every other competitor. | | I would much rather have had something with a 6502. | wsc981 wrote: | TI Extended Basic had CALL PEEK and CALL LOAD that could be | used for similar purposes, from what I've read: | | https://www.ninerpedia.org/wiki/Programming#Useful_CALL_LOA | D... | | But you are correct, the base unit didn't have access to | these functions. You did need to get the TI Extended Basic | cartridge. | dnotq wrote: | The TI-BASIC SandBox was broken: | | https://atariage.com/forums/topic/218904-playground/ | | It was possible BITD too, but no one thought hard enough | about how to do it. There has been a lot of "pushing the | hardware" over the last decade. Lots of things that were | thought of as "not possible" have been done now. The | 99/4A community is very active, and there is a lot more | going on than just new games (although that is also a big | part of the activity). | tyingq wrote: | It's also amongst the most affordable old 8-bit choices on | eBay. I'm not sure why. | eesmith wrote: | The TI is a 16-bit computer. Indeed, that was the deciding | factor to get my Dad to buy a TI for the family. | tyingq wrote: | Ah, yes, right. Though with a 16 bit memory bus, like the | 8-bit machines it competed with, and only 16kb memory. | buescher wrote: | TI built a ton of them and closed them out at fire-sale | prices, and they mostly went into people's closets. It was | hard to do much with a base model but play its not-so-great | cartridge games so it has few fans. | | The fanatics though - there's really cool stuff people do. I | think you could cheaply upgrade the memory to 16-bit wide, | for example. | compsciphd wrote: | I spent a lot of time playing parsec and munch-man (yes a | pac-man clone, but unique in its own way) | bink wrote: | Tunnels of Doom was probably my first exposure to | Dungeons & Dragons. I woulda played that every day if it | didn't require loading from audio tape via a cassette | player (a process that was very prone to errors). | Narishma wrote: | > Turns out the TI 99/4A has a thriving community and homebrew | scene | | I think that's the case of pretty much all 8 and 16-bit | machines. | endlos wrote: | What I meant to express is that even though the TI 99/4A is | relatively obscure, especially outside the US, it does have a | large and active international community. | | Its distant and even more obscure relative, the Pyuuta, also | has a community, but I wouldn't really call it thriving. | tyingq wrote: | They sold 2.8 million of them. More than the total sales | for the VIC-20. For comparison, the C64 was ~15M, original | Apple II ~6M, Atari 400/800 ~4M. | jhgb wrote: | > They sold 2.8 million of them | | Internationally? I don't recall having seen any of them | in Germany in the 1980s. Plenty of Sinclairs and | Commodores, even an Armstrad, but nothing from TI. | mmerlin wrote: | I got one in Australia with Extended Basic, speech | synthesiser, joysticks and cassette. The sprites were | next-level cool compared to my friends Apple II, Vic-20 | and Trash-80 | | I wrote a pretty good frogger clone (with only the road | part to cross) that worked so well because the event loop | was just joystick input and call coinc(all) for sprite | collision with the Y axis value of your frog indicating | you were in a home base position. | | I also wrote a kind of 3 part game where each stage used | the full resources of the machine, and each stage of the | game required another load from cassette, which normally | wipes all your memory and therfore variables so in order | to pass variables between the stages of the game I wrote | hex values into the extended font/character set memory, | because the last few were user editable and retained in | memory even after fresh program load (which would decode | the hex from the font character to keep your score and | number of lives consistent with the prior program/stage | of the game). | | I had Parsec too of course, but way more fun creating | your own games from scratch, or porting a printout of a | game from TRS-80 basic and then converting it to use | sprites. | | Aged 11 to 13 I spent my school holidays mostly indoors | learning to code, fond memories of the magic of discovery | and creation :) | mongol wrote: | They were sold in Sweden, my uncle had one. | tyingq wrote: | I can't find any solid stats, but it does seem like most | of the sales were US and Canada. And probably a fair | amount of those sales after they priced it below cost | during their death throes. I believe it was under $50 at | the end, which was crazy cheap at the time. | pm215 wrote: | It was our family's first computer in the UK -- pretty | sure my Dad picked it up very cheap when the local | department store were getting rid of the last of their | stock after TI killed the machine. The lack of commercial | games for it compared to the Spectrum etc meant I spent | more time typing in BASIC listings, which was my first | introduction to computer programming... | phaedrus wrote: | As far as I know the Epson QX-10 / QX-16 is the only home | computer system to have never had a game written for it. I've | always intended to rectify that situation, since a QX-10 was | my first computer, but my current QX-16 system didn't come | with a monitor. It uses a nonstandard 40 Hz refresh rate so | video capture probably wouldn't work, either (though I've | never tried). | mdp2021 wrote: | Some of them seem to be recent porting requiring backward | engineering, probably from the Spectrum: will authors like Rasmus | Moustgaard have performed a full BE, or are there tricks for a | speedy porting? | 10GBps wrote: | TI-99 was my first real computer bought in 1982 for $50 from | K-mart. I learned to program on it. I remember buying a few | "whatever" games to get the speech synthesizer for cheap (or | free?). Took forever to save enough money to buy Extended Basic | so I could do sprites and stuff. | | Fun times. I still have it in the original box with all the carts | and speech synthesizer. I always wanted that big expansion module | with the disk drives. Never could afford it. | | A few years later got an excellent deal on a used C64 and moved | on to it where it was a little more open platform. | icedchai wrote: | I had a T1-99/4A growing up, probably around 1982 or so when I | was in elementary school. I "taught" myself BASIC by copying | programs from the manual it came with. Unfortunately, I had no | tape or disk drive, so whatever I did disappeared when I turned | it off. | | I also remember playing Parsec: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCSQd0eJKQQ | tyingq wrote: | It's funny that the "Snake Plissken" game description doesn't | mention anything about the movie where the name came from. The | game play itself is unrelated to the movie, so perhaps that why. | maliker wrote: | I did my first programming in basic on a ti-83. Seeing the more | advanced creations out there in assembly inspired me to learn | more. These machines are still a great entry into programming. | kiddico wrote: | Same here. A friend and I started trying to write solvers for | our homework and our teacher loved it. He pulled out sync | cables and stuff for us to use (both of us had second hand | calculators, lots missing) and gave us hints when we got stuck. | | I need to go thank him sometime. That catapulted both of us in | the direction of a CS degree. | adrianmonk wrote: | Hah, Turmoil! That was a pretty good Atari 2600 game. | | And as far as I know not a very well-known one. Someone gave me | that cartridge as a gift, and I never knew anyone else who had | it. | teddyh wrote: | Castle Conquer looks like a very similar game to "Hunchback" from | the Commodore 64. | ksarul wrote: | TI sold about 250,000 units in Germany, starting in early 1980. | They had European manufacturing sites for hardware and software | in Holland and Italy. They even released a number of software | packages in a number of European languages--and a few of these | software packages were unique to the European market. It was | known outside of Europe as well. It was sold in Japan in 1980, | Australia and New Zealand, and South America. Argentina even had | manufacturing facilities for hardware and software, and continued | building/selling systems until 1986, two years beyond the point | US and European production stopped. | smoldesu wrote: | I had a TI-89 in high school, which was a fair bit more powerful | than the standard TI-84 (but still similar enough to not get | confiscated during tests). The extra horsepower let you play some | crazy stuff: I remember a remake of Doom's E1M1 in stunning | fidelity, as well as a compromised but still fun 2D version of | Minecraft. And once the novelty of that wore off, you could | always dip into some Tetris or Pac-Man. | | Actually, screw that calculator. It's probably the reason why I | failed so many math assignments. | tgv wrote: | The TI99 was a basic-computer-in-a-keyboard, not a calculator. | kevstev wrote: | The TI-99/4A was an early 16 bit PC from the very early 80s, it | was not part of the calculator line. The naming is very similar | though: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A | | Its relatively obscure, I only know it because it was my first | computer, given to me as a cast off in the late 80s. I wrote | basic programs that I copied out of books into it, looking at | this site I am actually blown away that it had the capabilities | for "real" games. | [deleted] | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | > Its relatively obscure | | I don't agree. Maybe it's because you got it in the late 80s, | and by then it was under powered and there were so many other | choices like inexpensive IBM PC clones. In the early / mid | 80s, it was definitely popular where I lived... and it was | inexpensive compared to things like the Apple 2e. I had two | friends with TI 99/4a units. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-09-18 23:00 UTC)