TI-99/4A Expansion System

[appleIImidi]

Picked up one of these today... Haven't really paid attention to TI stuff lately, but I always thought the were kind of rare? Not sure who the market was for this thing. It's built like an early 70s rack unit but it's made for home use? No wonder TI wasn't competitive.

 

[VeryVon]

No wonder TI wasn't competitive.

I know you didn't mean anything by this, and I still feel compelled to reply haha but don't take my comments as trying to start an argument. I have a PEB myself, and I agree, the construction & shielding is tank-like. Heck it probably could take an RPG hit and survive. Add in the weight of that transformer in the linear power supply and you have yourself a genuine boat anchor! I don't particularly enjoy lifting it, but when it's on the bench, well what a hearty chunk of equipment to work with.

And as in all the other machines of this era (I don’t dare compare them, because everyone has their own preference for which machines are their favorite) it holds legendary status among its enthusiasts. Heck just check out this atariage page!

TI-99/4A development resources

Don't forget to visit Ninerpedia; our wiki about the TI-99/4A. Check here. If you are the owner of one of the programs or sites and do not want it posted, please let me know and it will be removed immediately. Also if you think a reference to an important development resource is missing, then ple...

forums.atariage.com

 

[appleIImidi]

I know you didn't mean anything by this, and I still feel compelled to reply haha but don't take my comments as trying to start an argument. I have a PEB myself, and I agree, the construction & shielding is tank-like. Heck it probably could take an RPG hit and survive. Add in the weight of that transformer in the linear power supply and you have yourself a genuine boat anchor! I don't particularly enjoy lifting it, but when it's on the bench, well what a hearty chunk of equipment to work with.

And as in all the other machines of this era (I don’t dare compare them, because everyone has their own preference for which machines are their favorite) it holds legendary status among its enthusiasts. Heck just check out this atariage page!

TI-99/4A development resources

Don't forget to visit Ninerpedia; our wiki about the TI-99/4A. Check here. If you are the owner of one of the programs or sites and do not want it posted, please let me know and it will be removed immediately. Also if you think a reference to an important development resource is missing, then ple...

forums.atariage.com

Thanks for your reply. I didn't mean anything negative by that comment, we all know how everything turned out. I always thought the specs looked promising but TI seemed to fumble the ball a bunch and cut their losses before it was too late.

Anyway, I'm just glad to have saved this from the scrap pile.

Looks like a nice IIe in your avatar, I could never get used to that color screen though. Green for me, though I would love to find one of the amber ones, if they really ever made any of them.

 

[appleIImidi]

Powered the TI-99/4A up today, though I did not attach the expansion box. This is my 2nd 99, the other one I have is void of any accessories or cartridges. I made an RCA cable to attach to a modern TV, and kind of got bored with the clunky BASIC and lack of monitor, disk drives, etc. that my IIe has. This one has a speech synthesizer and extended BASIC cartridge, so it's been pretty fun to play around with that. The keyboard is still too scrunched and having essential symbols on the function key is tiring though. Not to mention the keys bounce like crazy if you try to touch type at any speed over like 10WPM. It sure has some character though...

 

[geoffm3]

Picked up one of these today... Haven't really paid attention to TI stuff lately, but I always thought the were kind of rare? Not sure who the market was for this thing. It's built like an early 70s rack unit but it's made for home use? No wonder TI wasn't competitive.

I don't think that your criticism is ill-placed and in retrospect there were a lot of mistakes made with the machine that ultimately cost it marketshare. I have a soft spot for the 99/4A as it was my first "real" computer, my parents bought one in 1983 and I never had a PEB for it back in the day, just the console, speech synthesizer, a handful of carts and a cassette deck. I learned to program in BASIC on this machine. I have had a couple of PEBs (including now) much later than the first machine.

Anyways, there is no denying that TI unnecessarily built in a lot of extra cost to the system compared to its peers. If we're fair, getting a system with 32K of RAM is quite big and clunky compared to the Atari 8-bit machines for example. I do think it's a cool bit of kit but if I was buying it at full retail price I think it would have been hard to justify its expanded configuration compared to other machines that were available at the time. Nevertheless I enjoy the machine precisely because its such a weird design compared to the others of the time, with some strange design choices which hamstring the machine. The CRU? GPL? 256 bytes of system RAM? 16-bit CPU with 16-bit address bus. Expansion ram on an 8-bit data bus? RS-232 interface rx/tx transferred via CRU? I think a lot of the design decisions that they made were carried over from the 99/4 which had to contend with high costs of memory which they were more beholden to in no small part due to its 16-bit architecture. If not for the GROMs that would have pushed the price of the machine up quite a bit since the software memory footprint was larger... one could reasonably argue that they picked the wrong CPU and this apparently was hotly contested within TI but the mandate was that they eat their own dog food. They tried to save costs in all the wrong ways while building in more cost in other ways. Still a fun machine though.

Without a doubt the biggest impact the TI had on the landscape was the VDP. This was used in not only my favorite machine, the Coleco ADAM/Coleco Vision (and in a lot of respects, that is probably a better "99/4A", and if some TI designers had their way would have looked nearly identical specwise to the core complex of the Coleco ADAM), but also a slew of other machines and derivative designs that go along with it: the SG-1000, Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear, Sega Genesis, MSX, Coleco, Tomy Tutor, I'm sure I'm forgetting more... all these machines owe their very existence to the 99/4A.