Texas Instruments

Hardware

The TI 99/4A

TI 99/4A, usually referred to (well by us gnomes at least) simply as the Texas Instruments, was the first computer I ever touched and the only computer of mine I just can’t remember where to find. Damn! This Space Invaders cartridge was so utterly amazing, and so unbelievably better than its Atari 2600 version, I’d just love to play it again… Show it to them silly Atari loving kiddies. Take it out for a beer even. Ah, the days, the days…

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Blog

Motivational Monday: Knock Offs

I really don’t want to call this game a knock off because I owned both it and the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A that it was released for, but it was loosely based on Pac-Man. The cool thing was the differences including the fact that you were trying to connect links to form a chain not eat dots. Also the ghosts in the game, called Hoono’s change from level to level. As the game continues your enemy gets much faster than you and their vulnerability time is greatly reduced.

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Company Representatives

Steven Peeler: Soldak Entertainment

I think this was the first rpg that I played on a computer and I sure do have fond memories. Even with minimal graphics, which were actually pretty good at the time, it was still frightening and great fun exploring and killing all of the monsters. All to save some king or something. 🙂 It had multiple character types, a party, turn based combat, random encounters, layout, and items, and an auto-map. Some of this is common now, but this is from a game made almost 30 years ago.

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Interviews

The Interview: Chris Tremmel

The process has become more complicated, usually requiring a large number of people to make something significant. The money involved in some of the triple A games is staggering with some budgets now reaching 100 million dollars. That naturally changes everything in terms of peoples priorities, and agendas. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

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Hardware

Texas Instruments Bill Cosby

The TI-99 was released in June of 1981 it cost around five hundred bucks and that was without a monitor. The CPU was the TI TMS9900, 3MHz. The display was a Video via an RF modulator 32 characters by 24 lines text and 192 X 256, 16 color graphics. The ROM cartridge was located on the front it and had Audio/Video ports and a joystick input (we used the Atari joystick). The OS was ROM Basic.

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