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?

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).

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.