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

I still have my TI-99/4A! I received it Christmas morning of 1983, although a Timex/Sinclair had been on my wish list. Sears had them marked down to $50 during the 8-bit wars. Mom had been up all night hand-typing in a BASIC demo so it would be running in the morning. Many Wumpuses were hunted that day.

Today, it has a F17A video processor that enables VGA output: https://dnotq.io/f18a/intro.html

And a FinalGROM99 cartridge, so I can have an SD card with all the program cartridges loaded. https://endlos99.github.io/finalgrom99/

There's still a community of fairly active development for retrogames, and some of them are quite good given capabilities of the hardware. My niece particularly enjoys a marble game called Skyway, try it on the online emulator at https://ti99ers.com

> Mom had been up all night hand-typing in a BASIC demo so it would be running in the morning. Many Wumpuses were hunted that day.

Hah, that’s a bit of special effort into making Christmas a little bit more magic. Was she a tech person of some kind?

Well she was smarter than those families who paid for the cartridge edition of "Hunt the Wumpus", like mine.

She was a High School math teacher, but had an intensest in computing and programming from working on her Master's degree, where she learned state-of-the art COBOL programming. The first computer we had in the house at all was a few years previous, when her school district allowed her to take home a brand new Commodore PET over the summer break. On that machine, many stick-figure men were hung from the gallows. https://www.commodoregames.net/CommodorePET/Hangman-(2)-342....

I've been buying and restoring older stuff (2013 Mac Pro most recently, recapped a Mac SE before that) and I think you just gave my 99 4/a new life. Thanks for that!

> Today, it has a F17A video processor that enables VGA output: https://dnotq.io/f18a/intro.html

This is awesome. I don't have a TI-99, but I do have an MSX that would hugely benefit from this.

>Many Wumpuses were hunted that day

Oh man! I remember playing 'Hunt the Wumpus'[0] with my cousins on my grandfathers TI-99 in the mid 80's. Probably the first computer I ever touched!

In the spirit of HN pedantry, should the plural be Wumpi? I will concede that wumpuses is way more fun to say..

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus