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

The graphics chip on this thing was a big deal. Variants ended up in the ColecoVision, the MSX line of computers and Sega's SG-1000 console. Later machines like the MSX2 and the Sega Master System had backwards-compatible but entirely different evolutions of the design.

Quite an impact for a graphics chip coming from a rather unsuccessful computer. I never played around with or even saw a TI-99 but from my understanding the CPU needing to use VRAM as data storage (because the system RAM was way too low for the time), accessed through IO ports, really hampered the machine.

While it lacked the hardware scrolling, massive master palette and display list tricks of the Atari machines, it displayed multi-color high-resolution graphics with ease. Being able to set a different color for each line of a background tile allowed for really detailed art.

Only 4 sprites per line like the Atari (not counting the weird missiles), but the TI-99 sprites are 16 pixels wide and high-resolution, rather than 8 fat pixels wide, and there's 32 to work with in total rather than needing to use raster splits to multiplex sprites.

Way ahead of its time. MSX homebrew games like Mini Ghost, The Cure, Invasion of the Zombie Monsters, etc. really show what it can do.

> Way ahead of its time. MSX homebrew games like Mini Ghost, The Cure, Invasion of the Zombie Monsters, etc. really show what it can do.

Too bad that at the time, TI actively discouraged third party developers from developing software for the TI-99/4(A) - they were selling the machines below production cost (because of the difficult market and the competition from cheaper mostly Commodore models) and hoped to recoup the losses by selling software (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A#Lack_of_third-party_d...).