Talk:Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

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I merged content from TI99/4A. Does it still read well? --Timc 14:56, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Contents 1 Other opinions 2 wot no picture? 3 games section? 4 Google Images 5 Car Wars 6 calculator rematch 7 Build quality 8 Tomy Tutor redirect

[edit] Other opinions

This is a nice article, but it isn't all that honest. Don't get me wrong, I have a certain fondness for the TI, and I've written an emulator for it... but it was never a usable or competitive computer.

The TI-99 wasn't "technologically competitive", especially after the IBM PC was released. Even though it had a 16-bit CPU, its severely crippled video display capabilities, lack of directly addressable RAM, and restricted programming capabilities made it a poor choice for any serious applications. Even a 6502-based machine at 1mhz could run rings around it.

Keep in mind that the TI was never meant to compete in the same market as the IBM PC, predates it by two years, and cost 1/6th the price of a PC! The TI-99/4 was originally designed at a time when it was assumed that the general public would want a computer for doing their taxes and playing video games; Texas Instruments (and many others) were caught by surprise when the home computer revolution spawned computer hobbyists who actually wanted to learn how to program in Assembly. :)

Its graphics capabilities were, frankly, horrible! Yes, it had a lot of sprites... and that's about all. Programs couldn't really do much graphically, thanks to the unavoidably slow VDP access. (It could easily take 30-40 microseconds to update one pixel, while on most of the then-current 8-bit machines screen contents could be updated at CPU clock rates during HBI/VBIs.) Lack of rational bitmapped graphics modes didn't help either. Scrolling was a serious challenge.

Lack of useful collision detection between sprites made them astoundingly useless for games, as all the VDP could tell you was that two or more sprites overlapped--not which ones! Programs rarely used most of the sprites, because only four of them could appear on any given scanline (the rest were blanked); witness Pole Position's awful monochromatic "enemy cars". There's no way it competed graphically with either the C64 or the Atari, at least not in terms of natively usable horsepower.

The C64 was introduced in 1982, the Atari 400/800 also in 1982. Remember that the TI's closest contemporary competition was the 1977 Apple II which was designed (and priced!) as a business computer, the equally expensive business-oriented PET, and the VIC-20 which can only be dismissed as lame (with the aluminized cardboard RF shields in the VICtim-20/C-64 versus the nickel-plated steel in the TI, your analogy is like comparing a Hyundai with an automobile). The /4 was introduced in 1979 and was extremely competitive in its day; the /4A was an enhanced but mostly software-compatible replacement which didn't sacrifice compatibility (after all, users weren't interested in understanding why their new computer wouldn't run the software already available for it).

Furthermore, Pole Position is a bad example. It was released by Atarisoft, based on reverse engineering of the machine rather than by actual formal documentation from TI.

I flaw TI on a few things, the biggest of them being the lack of schematics and other technical documentation being provided by TI. They didn't know any better at the time and wanted to corner the market. I flaw TI for not extending the 16 bit bus out to the expansion port so that multiplexed and 16 bit RAM expansions (and other 16-wide peripherals) could be optionally available. (I think I'd call one "Basic RAM Expansion" and the other "Turbo RAM Expansion", but this is with over 25 years of hindsight in the personal/home computer marketplace under my belt.) I flaw TI on the double-interpreted BASIC (BASIC -> GPL -> machine code). I flaw TI for not having added a video input jack and genlock into the machine, since the VDP was capable of external sync and the VCR and home video cameras were just starting out and it would have been an exclusive to be able to corner the market on titling your own home movies (ie. a Video Toaster 6 years ahead of its time). I flaw TI for not having a decent (bigger than 48 key) keyboard - surely at least some prospective home computer users had taken touch typing courses. And I flaw TI for not making all graphics modes available directly from BASIC interpreter built into the machine. But hey, hindsight is 20/20; at the time, no one cared - what still blows my mind is that TI actually stuffed a 16-bit processor in there, they must have had an 8 bit processor which would have been cheaper to use!

Finally, as an electrical engineer with an understanding of marketing, what really blows me is TI's advertising. TI was good at selling to engineers - and still is - all I want is specifications. While TI was showing a picture of a TI-99/4A on the box, Commodore's box was a big and colorful thing showing "Commodore VIC-20 - With color and music!" (nb. less colors, less resolution, and less voices - to say nothing of RAM or CPU horsepower which 1981 K-Mart shoppers didn't understand). Amazingly enough, TI didn't even mention the 16 bit processor (I can see the ad line: "Double the bits, double the power!" Let alone "Two cassette ports built in! Two Joystick ports built in!", etc.) on the boxes or in *any* North American advertising that I saw as a TI user and afficionado during the home computer era.

Summarizing TI's faults: lack of 16 bit bus extended to the expansion port allowing high-speed expansion; lack of a video input jack which would have cost an LM1881, one capacitor, and two resistors; lack of any idea how to sell *anything* (let alone computers) to the unwashed, ignorant and uncircumcised masses; and lack of technical documentation with the understanding that this would promote platform development and therefore sales. But hey, it was 1979.

But the computer's true "Achilles' heel" was that TI didn't want anyone writing machine-language programs for it! TI only officially authorized GROM-based programs, which ran very, very slowly (both because they only supported serialized data access and because they were interpreted). Its built-in BASIC was one of the worst on the market, and the fact that it was also GROM-based didn't help.

Agreed. You could almost hear the tic-tic-tic of that thing incrementing the address register when simply running { 10 CALL CLEAR :: 20 A=A+1 :: 30 PRINT A :: 40 GOTO 20 }. Again defending TI, I think the focus was more about user friendliness (big title graphics and menu, etc.) because no one thought that speed or power were actual selling features. (Killer is the VIC-20, new in box in my closet, never used: "VIC-20: The FRIENDLY computer" would just disply "4021 BYTES READY" if it were powered up.)

TI Logo, one of the more memorable software products for the machine, was simultaneously a pinnacle of absurdity. Because of the lack of memory it had to place restrictions on what could be drawn on screen. If the on-screen display became too complex (more than 256 unique tiles) you'd get an "out of ink" error. (Remember, the computer had no native RAM to speak of; video memory had to be shared with the Logo program. If it had used a true bitmapped display it wouldn't have had enough memory left for any significant programs. TI Logo-II got around this by requiring a PE box plus memory expansion.)

First off, the RAM expansion was available without buying the PEB ("PE Box"), it was a popular standalone option.

TI Logo was neither memorable nor popular, though I don't think it had anything to do with that - I don't think Logo was popular at all outside of schools. TI did release *many* cartridges which allowed full bitmaps - Parsec, Alpiner, etc. - which included static RAM to alleviate the VDU RAM issue.

The above statemnt is not correct. Neither Parsec nor Alpiner had static RAM. Both had GROMs and ROMs, but no RAM. The only cartridge with static RAM was MiniMemory.

Frankly, it's truly impressive to see just how slowly a 16-bit CPU can be made to run. The 9900 had some great ideas (if nothing else, register windows!) but the 99/4A hardware or software never took advantage of any of them.

The machine was actually quite fast when running *anything* with real CPU RAM, despite the 8/16 clusterfsck; certainly competitive with anything in its day and even extending beyond (C-64, etc.). I highly agree, though, neither hardware nor software did anything with it. I can understand the lack of CPU RAM in the console (even a few k was very expensive in a day when it was assumed that most users wouldn't care about a computer's speed). But okay, so let's make the expansion port 8 bits wider - that's a cheap card-edge connector and a few more traces on the PC board; so far, we're not breaking the bank and we've got future possibilities - why the hell didn't they do it? Dunno. Maybe even sell a 16-bit 32k RAM expansion at cost to promote the machine?

GROM itself makes sense for most users (who will never buy expansion peripherals, I guess they figured), but I really think the BASIC interpreter should have been in ROM.

(Note to non-TI experts: GROM is "Graphics" ROM, a self-incrementing ROM developed by TI, and which was usually relatively small and cheap at the expense of speed. A common hack with the 99/4A is to desolder the BASIC GROM and replace it with the GROM from the Disk Manager 2 cartridge, effectively building DM2 into the console.)

And finally, the register windows. Yeah, registers in RAM were great (a TMS9900 feature). I've seen many upon many TI programs which took advantage of the near-instant context switches, allowing the machine to multitask based on the human-imperceptible vertical interrupt coming from the TMS9918. There's lots of TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A software using this feature. What year did DesqView come out? (I dunno, I was using my TI-99/4A until 1990 when I bought an Amiga, and that until 2000 when Linux was finally viable as an operating system for the x86 platform.)

The final stake in its heart was the lack of affordable expansion capabilities, as most of the interesting expansions required the absurdly expensive PE box (basically a card cage with a power supply... only $900 or so).

32k RAM expansion, disk controller (3 drives without the sleazy Commodore I-can't-believe-it's-not-a-cassette serial interface speed issues), RS-232 port (2 serial, one parallel), and the most popular speech synthesizer were all available without using the PEB. Admittedly, the PEB was insanely expensive, but it was also insanely overbuilt; I suspect TI Micro farmed out the design to TI Mini... or maybe even TI Military.

The 99/4a was intended to be very cheap to produce hardware-wise, hence the serialized ROMS, VDP and such. But it never reached that goal for a couple of reasons: the promised 8-bit version of the 9900 CPU didn't happen so they had to release it with an expensive 16-bit version, and there was very little interest in their other serialized hardware chips so they were never that economical to produce.

And yet again, TI was well ahead of their time. USB. Firewire. Serial ATA. Texas Instruments HexBUS interface. The Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.

And there's still nothing like the flicker of the PEB's access lights then the clunk-clunk-clunk of the old Shugart reading 90k off what now seems to be a ridiculously oversized diskette on hardware which is now as old as many of my coworkers. To t1heir credit, the PEB, TI Color Monitor, the console, and all other TI-built home computer hardware I've ever owned have never suffered a hardware failure. I still have a console, "Wired Remote Controllers" (joysticks), speech sythesizer and cartridge drawer in my living room, and another system (complete with PEB, CorComp disk controller and Horizon RAMdisk) beside the machine I'm currently using. (It's part of my homage to Generation X.)

Please summarize your point, and please sign ur comments. --Soumyasch 10:42, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] wot no picture?

Anyone fancy adding a picture to this article? --Rebroad 16:44, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] games section?

What about having a section in the article on the TI's (most popular) games, such as Parsec, TI Invaders, Munch-man (Munch Man or Munchman?), and Car Wars. Those four stand out to me. 24.222.121.193 01:17, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Google Images

The external link to search for images of TI99/4A is labelled as Google images. But the actual images come from somewhere else. Google merely indexes them. So the link title should not be Google images. Actually, link to search for a particular item should not be kept. The user can do the search himself if she wants to. --Soumyasch 10:40, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

I can add a picture of an original TI-99/4A retail box, if anyone sees any use in having that on the wiki. Alex W 21:08, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

-- Go for it! The TI-99/4A's retail box was another horrible marketing blunder! While Commodore was selling the VICtim-20 in boxes bragging "The Friendly Computer! With Color and Music!", TI simply had a picture of the home computer on the face. Nothing about sprite graphics, more colors and voices than the Vic, and absolutely nothing about the 16 bit processor. TI was selling the computer to consumers the way you'd sell a calculator to an engineer: a small technical specs box.

[edit] Car Wars

I have just started an article about Car Wars, one of the video games mentioned in this article. The article is by necessity a stub, since I have based the information in it entirely on my childhood memories of playing the game. I could use some help from anyone who has more information. marbeh raglaim 05:56, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] calculator rematch

The TI/Commodore price war was Tramiel's revenge for TI pricing him out of the calculator market in the 70s. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.125.110.223 (talk) 15:54, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Build quality

The article talks about the higher build quality of the TI - has this translated into a higher % of surviving examples?69.125.110.223 (talk) 18:16, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tomy Tutor redirect

Someone made a link about a port made on the "Tomy Tutor". When I clicked it, it brought me to the TI-99. I don't feel this is right because a redirect is like "The name of the article is not identical but it's the same thing". So, ok, the TT had TI-99 parts, but it wasn't THE TI-99. It's like redirecting a bicycle to a motorcycle because both have 2 wheels - but they are two very distinct objects. The TT really should have its own article and the redirect removed. -- Lyverbe (talk) 12:12, 30 May 2008 (UTC)