Geoff Oltmans

@OLD CS1 We returned home from a trip to Orlando a few days ago. Our route took us via Perry and about 13 miles away from where it made landfall. We got to see the before and after on the way down and back. Hopefully everyone affected can recover quickly.

Rich was a great guy and an asset to the community! Got to meet him in person at Adamcon back in about 2010(?) when it was held in Grand Rapids.

Ugh, that's been my life lately, don't get me started. My favorite is when pro-whitespace people tell you to just "turn on visible whitespace in your editor." Uh, how is that any better than already visible scope markers like {}???

PSh.. "pain sticks" that's part of the visceral experience you can't get with emulation! haha

At the end of the day it’s all for funsies, isn’t it?

Yeah, and then it's like, "why are we even doing this? If we change it too much and all we wanted was a more powerful computer, why not just use a PC?" I admit it's a existential problem I struggle with with a lot of retro hardware projects (Commander X16?).

The Intellivision version is the best IMO.

It's certainly a lot cheaper to build low numbers PCBs these days with more than 2 layers... so maybe that would help.

Oh, I'm under no illusion that there wouldn't be (potentially significant or impossible) issues with bus timing and/or software timings. Usually wiring things up is the easy part. hehe

Go watch a video of someone refinishing a Delorean and see what some of the challenges are. It's a bit of an art form to get a uniform brushed finish. I imagine whatever brushing out of the aluminum you do would probably require some replating step as well as arcadeshopper points out if you see any with gouges the color is quite a bit different than what's on the surface.

That's what I figured. I can't recall ever seeing anybody talk about them back in the day or after the fact. All I found was some references in an old Micropendium.

Kinda awful that a publisher would let such a glaring bug out the door.

Were there ever any CPU accelerators sold for the TI? I see where a couple were announced at one point.

Well, upgrades after the fact are kinda moot... if you're gonna do that, then the Commodore 64 has similar type upgrades, including some CPU accelerators. As far as the video goes, the VIC-II has more flexible color usage for tile graphics, can do more than 4 sprites per scanline, raster interrupt, and has hardware scrolling capabilities. You could argue that the Commodore's palette is uglier and I wouldn't necessarily disagree there. That's not to say I don't like the 9918 though... it was very influential and the followup designs (MSX and Sega on the Master System and Game Gear) that were backward compatible with it addressed pretty much all it's shortcomings. CPU was much faster on the 64. More memory available in the whole 64K address space. You could certainly have a much more capable C-64 for a lot less money with a single disk drive and an RS-232 interface than a TI-99 with a PEB, memory expansion, disk drive, and RS232. Keyboard was better on the 64. I think TI XB was better than Commodore BASIC in all forms though. The TI had that sweet speech synthesizer. Still, warts and all I appreciate the TI and find it fascinating. It's a quirky machine. It was my first "real" computer (the TS/1000 was the absolute first, but got returned to the store and a TI replaced it), and then the C-64 came next.

Not sure I agree with that. The video capabilities are better in most respects, sound capabilities are better, the CPU is faster, and you have more memory to play with, even with an expanded 99, until you get into more exotic expansions, and even then you have similar upgrades on the 64.