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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: 0.282s | 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.

replies(4): >>43109378 #>>43109829 #>>43109851 #>>43111677 #
1. lightedman ◴[20 Feb 25 06:15 UTC] No.43111677[source]▶
"Coding in BASIC could, at the very least, hide the insanity from you."

Except TI-BASIC is a hell-riddled double-interpreted language. I had a 99/4A at the age of 6, learned how to use all of the TI-BASIC language by 8, and said screw that, hardware it is for me, dad's buying me a 286 for Christmas, time to learn how to build that!