A collection of modern games for the TI-99/4A | Hacker News Reader

A collection of modern games for the TI-99/4A

tigameshelf.net

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TI-99 was my first real computer bought in 1982 for $50 from K-mart. I learned to program on it. I remember buying a few "whatever" games to get the speech synthesizer for cheap (or free?). Took forever to save enough money to buy Extended Basic so I could do sprites and stuff.

Fun times. I still have it in the original box with all the carts and speech synthesizer. I always wanted that big expansion module with the disk drives. Never could afford it.

A few years later got an excellent deal on a used C64 and moved on to it where it was a little more open platform.

My Mom got one for me when I was about 6 or 7. Oh man, that speech synthesizer was amazing. It felt so cool to make it say stuff. I also learned to program on that thing. I used it for years. I still have it in the box too :)

I had a T1-99/4A growing up, probably around 1982 or so when I was in elementary school. I "taught" myself BASIC by copying programs from the manual it came with. Unfortunately, I had no tape or disk drive, so whatever I did disappeared when I turned it off.

I also remember playing Parsec: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCSQd0eJKQQ

Me too!

Parsec and… Hunt the Wumpus!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus

And munch man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munch_Man

TI sold about 250,000 units in Germany, starting in early 1980. They had European manufacturing sites for hardware and software in Holland and Italy. They even released a number of software packages in a number of European languages--and a few of these software packages were unique to the European market. It was known outside of Europe as well. It was sold in Japan in 1980, Australia and New Zealand, and South America. Argentina even had manufacturing facilities for hardware and software, and continued building/selling systems until 1986, two years beyond the point US and European production stopped.

I totally did not expect this on HN.

Turns out the TI 99/4A has a thriving community and homebrew scene, with two members in particular being exceptionally productive.

Those homebrow games created are even of at least an order of magnitude higher quality than what was available in the 80s.

Here is a list of 99/4a emulators https://www.99er.net/emul.shtml One of these emulators is on github https://github.com/tursilion/classic99 - in active development.

I had the luck of owning a TI99/4A as a kid; it had a very rich Basic, with the 16k extension cartridge you even had sprites and a synthesizer. I have made some 2d game stuff with pygame recently, and for me it felt as if I got back to this old machine... (here is this stuff, for the record: https://github.com/MoserMichael/pygamewrap )

TI Basic lacked peek and poke, so no access to assembler was available with the base unit, unlike every other competitor.

I would much rather have had something with a 6502.

TI Extended Basic had CALL PEEK and CALL LOAD that could be used for similar purposes, from what I’ve read:

https://www.ninerpedia.org/wiki/Programming#Useful_CALL_LOAD...

But you are correct, the base unit didn’t have access to these functions. You did need to get the TI Extended Basic cartridge.

The TI-BASIC SandBox was broken:

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/218904-playground/

It was possible BITD too, but no one thought hard enough about how to do it. There has been a lot of "pushing the hardware" over the last decade. Lots of things that were thought of as "not possible" have been done now. The 99/4A community is very active, and there is a lot more going on than just new games (although that is also a big part of the activity).

There are many new developers making games, utilities, new versions of languages, a GCC compiler patch to output 9900 code, a bunch of really cool modern hardware solutions including the TIPI that provides a modern hard disk and internet connectivity via a raspberry pi. and the F18A VDP replacement is on this and many other systems to get VGA out. more info: https://www.arcadeshopper.com/wp/ti-99-4a-faq/

> Turns out the TI 99/4A has a thriving community and homebrew scene

I think that's the case of pretty much all 8 and 16-bit machines.

As far as I know the Epson QX-10 / QX-16 is the only home computer system to have never had a game written for it. I've always intended to rectify that situation, since a QX-10 was my first computer, but my current QX-16 system didn't come with a monitor. It uses a nonstandard 40 Hz refresh rate so video capture probably wouldn't work, either (though I've never tried).

What I meant to express is that even though the TI 99/4A is relatively obscure, especially outside the US, it does have a large and active international community.

Its distant and even more obscure relative, the Pyuuta, also has a community, but I wouldn't really call it thriving.

They sold 2.8 million of them. More than the total sales for the VIC-20. For comparison, the C64 was ~15M, original Apple II ~6M, Atari 400/800 ~4M.

> They sold 2.8 million of them

Internationally? I don't recall having seen any of them in Germany in the 1980s. Plenty of Sinclairs and Commodores, even an Armstrad, but nothing from TI.

I got one in Australia with Extended Basic, speech synthesiser, joysticks and cassette. The sprites were next-level cool compared to my friends Apple II, Vic-20 and Trash-80

I wrote a pretty good frogger clone (with only the road part to cross) that worked so well because the event loop was just joystick input and call coinc(all) for sprite collision with the Y axis value of your frog indicating you were in a home base position.

I also wrote a kind of 3 part game where each stage used the full resources of the machine, and each stage of the game required another load from cassette, which normally wipes all your memory and therfore variables so in order to pass variables between the stages of the game I wrote hex values into the extended font/character set memory, because the last few were user editable and retained in memory even after fresh program load (which would decode the hex from the font character to keep your score and number of lives consistent with the prior program/stage of the game).

I had Parsec too of course, but way more fun creating your own games from scratch, or porting a printout of a game from TRS-80 basic and then converting it to use sprites.

Aged 11 to 13 I spent my school holidays mostly indoors learning to code, fond memories of the magic of discovery and creation :)

I can't find any solid stats, but it does seem like most of the sales were US and Canada. And probably a fair amount of those sales after they priced it below cost during their death throes. I believe it was under $50 at the end, which was crazy cheap at the time.

It was our family's first computer in the UK -- pretty sure my Dad picked it up very cheap when the local department store were getting rid of the last of their stock after TI killed the machine. The lack of commercial games for it compared to the Spectrum etc meant I spent more time typing in BASIC listings, which was my first introduction to computer programming...

They were sold in Sweden, my uncle had one.

It's also amongst the most affordable old 8-bit choices on eBay. I'm not sure why.

TI built a ton of them and closed them out at fire-sale prices, and they mostly went into people's closets. It was hard to do much with a base model but play its not-so-great cartridge games so it has few fans.

The fanatics though - there's really cool stuff people do. I think you could cheaply upgrade the memory to 16-bit wide, for example.

I spent a lot of time playing parsec and munch-man (yes a pac-man clone, but unique in its own way)

Tunnels of Doom was probably my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons. I woulda played that every day if it didn't require loading from audio tape via a cassette player (a process that was very prone to errors).

The TI is a 16-bit computer. Indeed, that was the deciding factor to get my Dad to buy a TI for the family.

Ah, yes, right. Though with a 16 bit memory bus, like the 8-bit machines it competed with, and only 16kb memory.

The source code for the Jetpac clone written in Forth is available here:

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/241846-new-game-project-je...

https://atariage.com/forums/applications/core/interface/file...

if I remember correctly, TI had a forth development environment for the 99/4a (TI-Forth).

Never heard of it, but I used a third-party system called Wycove Forth, back in the 80s. It was unimpressive by today's standards but fun enough for teenaged me.

I did my first programming in basic on a ti-83. Seeing the more advanced creations out there in assembly inspired me to learn more. These machines are still a great entry into programming.

Same here. A friend and I started trying to write solvers for our homework and our teacher loved it. He pulled out sync cables and stuff for us to use (both of us had second hand calculators, lots missing) and gave us hints when we got stuck.

I need to go thank him sometime. That catapulted both of us in the direction of a CS degree.

This is probably the best TI-99/4A emulator ever made. Runs entirely in the browser. Includes all carts and loads all carts and disks. Even has full assembler and debugger. A work of triumph.

http://js99er.net/#/

It's funny that the "Snake Plissken" game description doesn't mention anything about the movie where the name came from. The game play itself is unrelated to the movie, so perhaps that why.

It was my first computer, Christmas 1982. I recall it well, and not too long ago had some old Kodak disc film sent off for development and found photos of the fully expanded setup from 1983: https://bytecellar.com/2016/07/03/33-year-old-roll-of-film-o...

I currently have a comparable TI setup (not the same unit as my first), and still enjoy typing in magazine programs on it. I had some particular fun "recently" finding a magazine I had way back when, typing in the program again, and chatting with its author: https://bytecellar.com/2017/10/03/a-program-from-a-35-year-o...

Lovely memories.

I had a TI 99/4A back in the 80s. TI Logo was pretty good (the company had been interested in Logo for some years). The system architecture was really nice, and for the time, the 9900 microprocessor was really elegant.

What doomed the system was TI's vision of a closed architecture, with software distributed on cartridges on which TI would make a rip-roaring profit. When I read about this vision, I put my system up for sale, and sold it a few days before TI announced they were getting out of the “home computer” market.

I've never known much about TI's internal workings, but I've always imagined that the company, at least at that time, had excellent engineers and really clueless management.

Performance-wise I understood that their BASIC interpreter ran atop an interpreter in another language, which made BASIC quite slow. This at least seems to have been a questionable idea.

But I liked my TI-99/4A and it got me into programming (with help from my father).

I started on a TI-99/4a and learned to program on one. Some of the games you could buy on cartridge were really good for the early 80s, and the TI had great sound. The built in basic was pretty limited, but Extended Basic was great. Extended basic had programmable sprites, and you could write some pretty nice games with it. Everything else required a disk drive... so...

The downside to the TI was to get faster storage than a cassette deck, you had to buy an "peripheral expansion box" that often cost $2000, which was almost 10x more than the computer itself. I remember when my Dad bought the computer, he got it on sale in '82 for $199.

My Dad brought the 994A home while I was in elementary school. He later became the chair of the Chicago TI Users group for a while. I learned to program on Extended Basic, made a couple of extremely primitive games. I remember dictating game code from magazines while my Dad typed them in, and also reading and analyzing other people's code from shareware text adventures like Cake and Kidnapped. We had the expansion unit with memory and the floppy drive - the fan on that thing used to roar! Played hours of SPAD, Parsec, Scott Adams adventures, and bunches of Infocom games. This brings back lots of good memories for me.

Hah, Turmoil! That was a pretty good Atari 2600 game.

And as far as I know not a very well-known one. Someone gave me that cartridge as a gift, and I never knew anyone else who had it.

Some of them seem to be recent porting requiring backward engineering, probably from the Spectrum: will authors like Rasmus Moustgaard have performed a full BE, or are there tricks for a speedy porting?

I had a TI-89 in high school, which was a fair bit more powerful than the standard TI-84 (but still similar enough to not get confiscated during tests). The extra horsepower let you play some crazy stuff: I remember a remake of Doom's E1M1 in stunning fidelity, as well as a compromised but still fun 2D version of Minecraft. And once the novelty of that wore off, you could always dip into some Tetris or Pac-Man.

Actually, screw that calculator. It's probably the reason why I failed so many math assignments.

The TI-99/4A was an early 16 bit PC from the very early 80s, it was not part of the calculator line. The naming is very similar though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A

Its relatively obscure, I only know it because it was my first computer, given to me as a cast off in the late 80s. I wrote basic programs that I copied out of books into it, looking at this site I am actually blown away that it had the capabilities for "real" games.

> Its relatively obscure

I don’t agree. Maybe it’s because you got it in the late 80s, and by then it was under powered and there were so many other choices like inexpensive IBM PC clones. In the early / mid 80s, it was definitely popular where I lived… and it was inexpensive compared to things like the Apple 2e. I had two friends with TI 99/4a units.

I felt that to be true as I had never heard of it, and by the mid 80s if there was one PC everyone was talking about, it was the Commodore 64. Even years later when I got on the internet and tried to figure out what exactly it was that I learned to program on, it took a bit of work to find out what the exact model was and to find any real info about it.

But maybe its regional- I was also a small child (7-10ish) when I used it and even the adults around me rarely used computers, and when they did it was in an office context- like one for the entire office.

The TI99 was a basic-computer-in-a-keyboard, not a calculator.

Castle Conquer looks like a very similar game to “Hunchback” from the Commodore 64.

Highly recommend Turbo Forth when coding on the TI-99/4A.

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