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

I have such mixed feelings about the TI-99/4A.

It was our family computer. We rented games for it, and that was fun. I learned BASIC. I tried to create things with it, as advertised, and sort of only semi-succeeded repeatedly.

My parents saw that I was running into the limits of the system, and got me both the Extended Basic and Terminal Emulator II cartridges. I dug into Extended Basic, and was able to write "games" with actual sprites that could be manipulated! There they were, flying around, those sprites. That being said, these games always ended up being quite bad, and there wasn't a clear path for them to being much better. We were part of a users group, and the Extended Basic games others were making were perhaps more refined but also honestly not much better.

At the same time, Atarisoft were releasing epic cartridges for the TI. A strangely OK Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac Man, as good or better than on the other home computers. It was clear there was no path at all from whatever was going on with the Extended Basic cartridge to whatever magic voodoo allowed for the TI ports of these arcade games. (To be honest, I still don't really understand it, other than something to do with... GROM? Assembly?)

On the other hand, Terminal Emulator II, which my parents bought me so I could fool around with the TI's speech synthesizer, taught me about the need to connect to online services via a modem. I asked my parents about getting a modem, and they were like... "no".

My pre-teen brain was like "I need to buy myself a modem as soon as I can!"

I bought a 1200 baud modem out of Computer Shopper for mere dollars when I was 16. It changed my life. I got on boards, and then the Internet, before most - and probably you. I learned networking and architecture. No regrets.

But I still have no idea whatsoever how those TI programmers bridged the gap between my horrifically bad Extended Basic programs, where I felt I had maxed out the capabilities of the computer, and the magnificent games and arcade ports available via cartridge. It sort of haunts me. What even?

The difference is definitely Assembly. You could dip into heavier memory management, and control every aspect from that low level.

I got on to my local public library (in the US) with an 800 baud modem on the Atari 8-bit. There was barely any security, which was all bypassed by "password". I could check out books for individuals, alter the amount they owed in late-fees, or erase that someone had a book and then erase that the book ever existed. I have always been more of a white/grey hacker, as far as I don't always report an exploit, but I don't abuse it either. Now that I'm older, I am happy to report exploits confidentially.

I quickly found the BBS in my area were not as usable at 800 baud, and moved to a 286 with a modem slightly higher baud. Until my family got a 386, it was a bit slow, but I was still sitting there like an addict consuming my digital fix! Even in the mid-90's I was amazed at the speed of modems coming out. I believe in 1997/early 1998 I had saved enough money to buy myself my own PC, and had a faster modem. I'm not sure what the speed was back then, but it was good enough to play Quake 1. I started to lose touch with the low-level of computers around that time, but also saw the value in higher-level programming. I think having understood lower-level computers in my early years helped me to understand things like memory management in current days, where a lot of my co-workers have no concept of running into memory problems until they hit a wall.

I remember I made a (in my eyes) pretty decent Donkey Kong in Extended Basic with my father. But we knew nothing about better variants, so our impression wasn't spoiled by that. I am sure the program and game was pretty crude in comparison to what you tried to get out of this TI device, but we had no notion of "maxing out the capabilities". We just programmed and had tremendous fun. Printing out the entire program on a matrix printer, and annotating changes with a pen. Precious times.

The fundamental issue with BASIC on the TI-99/4A, be it the regular BASIC or even the Extended BASIC, is that the program was stored in the video memory. This meant that you couldn't use all features of the VDP, you could only use a limited number of tiles (96 afaicr), you could not use other graphics mode, raster interrupts and sprite multiplexing, forget it. The games on cartridges were not limited to that and could use up to 24K (afaicr) of machine code + a lot of GROM. One needs only to look at what a Coleco console or a MSX1 could do with a system that didn't use the graphic chip for what it was not intended to be.

There was a cartridge with an assembler & text editor plus a little CPU RAM. (4k? My memory is gone but it certainly wasn't much even for the 80s.) You'd still need to use cassette tape to save your work. Ah it was this: https://www.arcadeshopper.com/wp/ti-99-4a-faq-mini-memory/

For actually usable development you could buy a TI expansion box, 32K RAM expansion, and 5 1/4" floppy drive. This cost the equivalent of like two thousand bucks today. Less than an Apple ][, somewhat more than a base C-64, but a lot more than the TI-99 itself.

My parents were very indulgent in this. Once I had this setup, I bought a third-party Forth and coded my own Forth assembler vocabulary, and finally had a reasonably capable dev env, for maybe a year before leaving for college. But still had basically no way to share my work (wasn't online).

sprites were amazing for the time and then came the amiga!

The mini-memory cart has 4k of CPU RAM and a line-by-line assembler, no text editor.

It also has no disassembler. I spent many many hours dumping the ROMS using easy-bug and disassembling them by hand. Many happy hours.

Thanks for the correction. From my link:

> Each source statement you enter is immediately assembled into object code and stored into memory. Some source code is retained in a nine-page text buffer. You can scroll the screen to review previously entered lines of source code by pressing the Up- and down-arrow keys.

I gave up on this system pretty quick -- with so little space for your code, it just wasn't worth so much trouble.

> I asked my parents about getting a modem, and they were like... "no".

I asked my parents for a modem the same year Matthew Broderick's "Wargames" came out. My mom forbid me from ever using one because she had seen a movie about what happens when you have one of those things...

You needed this: http://mainbyte.com/ti99/software/s_carts/editor.html

Or this: http://mainbyte.com/ti99/software/s_carts/mini.html

I was in the same boat as you. Games like Microsurgeon were doing crazy things with the TI-99, and nothing that seemed possible with XB matched up. I didn't learn about the assembly programming tools until much later.

The retrocomputing scene for the TI-99 is pretty active, and there are people writing modern games that blow even the commercial software from back in the day out of the water. Check out Realms of Antiquity, along with anything written by Rasmus Moustgaard.