adamantyr

I was mainly reading this for the article about Kickstarters (I'm a backer of one of the projects that's gone crazy stupid ugly), but it also has an article about the TI-99/2. https://retro.wtf/kilobyte_magazin/KilobyteMagazine2020-1.pdf The catch? A guy managed to get a TI-99/2 IN ORIGINAL BOX. Talk about a holy grail!

Yeah, the manuals are identical. I see why the game is good too... written by Jim Dramis!

It's actually picture perfect to mine! Well done! I agree with OLD SCI, white background is best so people can print their own. Most of these are definitely cheap photocopy/print. Any card stock heavier than 110 pounds won't run through printers or photocopiers, and printing press prices were too high for such a low volume market. It's one of the reasons the Rainbow software manuals for Wizard's Lair and Revenge stand out; somebody actually contracted a printing company to make them. They printed the covers on 9x12 stock and then trimmed them down, allowing them to run ink all the way to the edges. The tapes and disks also had fancy foiled labels.

Checked my collection and here is what I have.

Yeah, at least Dragonflyer/Spot Shot was an interesting game with good use of bitmap. Many of their titles were not so good.

I agree. The 9918 palette does have some excellent gradient shades that work very well! I've tried to use a mix of colors with a lot of my artwork in the CRPG and it's worked pretty well. I discovered, for example, that light red and magenta actually compliment each other well. Magenta is one of the few oddball colors that tends to stick out against the others, so it's a good one to use for contrast. Something else I found out is that the grey is really more "off white" than a true mid-tone grey. If you want a darker tone, use light blue instead.

Well I'd say the Super Space II cartridge is largely redundant now. The fact so few were made made them not really supportable anyway. (Not even Classic99 supports it.)

What's the problem? All the supercarts are mapped to >6000 to >7FFF (8k), you just can only have one page at a time. Were you thinking you'd have the entire 32k accessible at one time?

I'm happy to get the cart to someone who could really use it! I suppose it's no surprise the original battery is completely dead. Hopefully you can get it working with a replacement. Adam

They're described on the tech pages under Subprograms in the Disk controller section: http://www.nouspikel.com/ti99/titechpages.htm File Input and File Output, which will just read and write a sector count to a file, ignoring record structures if present.

I still use the file system, I just access the files via their sectors, rather than use a record system. There are DSR subroutines to do this; access files via sector and you get the whole 256 bytes of a sector at a time.

You're absolutely right Rich. So much potential for a DSR is lost because it needs a VDP PAB and buffer space. The Corcomp disk controller had subroutines that would let you read and write directly to CPU addresses. I think it still had the hard requirement of a PAB in VDP though. And since it wasn't nearly common enough it didn't get used. What would be nice is if TIPI had a built in routine to read and page directly to AMS. Give it a page start, disk file, and let it just read right into it until complete and then branch to page and address of your choosing. The load times and speed is going to be the biggest bottleneck with the system.

I believe a 0 value for length is interpreted as a default record length of 80 bytes. I ran into this issue myself in my CRPG. I ended up going to sector read/write and just dropping the use of record abstractions for a lot of my data access.

Finally, Python 3! Unfortunately my first attempt to compile one of my modules failed with an unhelpful error message. raise AsmError(f'Invalid symbol name {name}') SyntaxError: invalid syntax I'm using Python 3.6.5.

Is that 1pm CST? So 11am PST? I may attend!

Been working on beta testing since November, we're up to build 27, with build 28 in process right now. Drop me a PM, Matt, if you want to join the next build release so you and your son can check it out?

I have a Super Space II, with disk and manual. Got it on eBay a few years back when that cache of NOS stuff was found and put up. I'm not sure I want to part with it, but in truth I don't need it. I'm using SAMS now for most of my development which is superior for memory availability. You can PM me an offer if you want.

I am pretty sure I only have Joypaint 1.0 as well, but this second disk appears to have a complete loader. JOYPNT2.DSK And trying to extract files from it fails, so yeah, copy protected. Ugh! ? And I don't have my original disks anymore.

Certainly has now, as my company will be putting me on furlough for six weeks.

Cool algorithms! Yeah when I wrote Wizard's Doom, I had to write a maze generator myself. I didn't want it to NEVER cross it's own path, as that generates slightly boring mazes. So I use a tolerance level and it's only initially biased not to cross it's own path, but can do so on a random chance or if there's nowhere else it can go. It's not too fast, but it only takes at most ten minutes to generate the largest maze on level 6. One of my sidelined projects is a Rougelike for the TI, which will involve a much more complex procedural generating system. Not just mazes but rooms and other features. Should be fun to write when I can get to it!

It sounds familiar... I'm not sure I've seen a printed magazine listing for the TI using the technique though. What it's doing is using a nybble value (0-15) to indicate open or closed spaces on the four sides of the cell. So if it was NSEW and you wanted walls on the north and east side, it would be 1010, or value 10. The maze generator in Wizard's Doom uses this technique as it's very efficient in terms of storing the maze. If it was written in BASIC though, that's impressive because you'd have to use adds instead of bitwise operations, which are only available in XB.

Yeah I figured that would happen. My own company based in Seattle told everyone to WFH until the 20th at least.

Just an FYI, the latest version of Classic99's debugger now has the ability to view the AMS memory even if it's not IN active memory, which is a useful tool. I got Mike to add that feature after I kept having problems with bad data that I couldn't see in memory until after pages had been swapped.

I have no problem with paying for high quality work and creative endeavor. One thing the TI community taught me a long time ago was respecting the value of creative talent and producers. I saw first-hand what software piracy did to the community.

I, for one, don't intend to go back to 32k.