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

(bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com)
168 points rbanffy | 3 comments | 16 Feb 25 18:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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buildsjets ◴[20 Feb 25 00:11 UTC] No.43109525[source]▶
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

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1. bee_rider ◴[20 Feb 25 01:35 UTC] No.43110086[source]▶
> 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?

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2. manyturtles ◴[20 Feb 25 03:10 UTC] No.43110663[source]▶
Well she was smarter than those families who paid for the cartridge edition of "Hunt the Wumpus", like mine.
3. buildsjets ◴[20 Feb 25 04:04 UTC] No.43110972[source]▶
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....