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The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A

(bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com)
168 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 16 Feb 25 18:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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PaulHoule ◴[19 Feb 25 23:23 UTC] No.43109081[source]▶
I guess next week they're going to get to the interesting bit which is how weird the architecture actually was on that thing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A

Particularly it only had 256 bytes of RAM attached to the CPU but had (I think) 16 kb of RAM attached to the video controller which the CPU could read and write through I/O registers. You could use this for non-video storage but you couldn't access it directly.

Coding in BASIC could, at the very least, hide the insanity from you.

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1. bb88 ◴[19 Feb 25 23:54 UTC] No.43109378[source]▶
As I recall at the time, very few people knew how to write assembly for that machine, as there just wasn't a lot to go on.

I enjoyed the sprites though, and that was something that was definitely different than Apple II, IBM, etc. at the time. Apple and IBM's graphics were definitely a step down.

C64 could do sprites with POKE statements apparently. But that was definitely not as nice as the TI.