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.

The Armatron was a great toy.

Are there any other calibration steps you need to do? I checked voltages on my supply and they seemed to be right on, but I can't recall if I looked at them with the FG99 plugged in. I have noticed that the GROM bus is really noisy on both consoles I've checked.

The GROM test tests all the address spaces for the expansion GROMs 3-7, and I guess the larger cart firmware with more than one GROM in them were the ones that were failing pretty frequently for whatever reason. I haven't really poked around the CPLD source/changes to understand why it made a difference, but it definitely did.

I had some similar issues with my FG99... some programs wouldn't work with the SS and/or the PEB plugged in while using the FG99. The one game that I noticed this on specifically was Alpiner... the graphics would be garbled or the game would freeze almost immediately when gameplay started...but there were several others. I had a couple of components I ended up having to replace on my console in addition to this, but the firmware on the FG99 CPLD that came loaded on my FG99 just wouldn't work with some software. Download the FG99 test utilities on the github repo, and try running the GROM test. Mine would consistently fail this test when external expansions were plugged in, but after the CPLD image posted here for v2.2 boards it worked fine (and mine is a silver and black console to boot). I also had some issues with a real Parsec cartridge with the speech synthesizer plugged in that caused some garbled video (but the game would otherwise play), but wouldn't work at all when the PEB was plugged in. I had to change a couple of components in the console to address that. If you can load the CPLD firmware from this thread I'd try that...

To me it's a bit like the "is firmware software?" arguments. FPGA implementations of hardware are behavioral models and as such are approximations of the original article unless they are constructed as gate-level reproductions (which wouldn't truly be possible in FPGAs anyway. So, in essence they are emulating the original device.

ROM checksum good?

Yep... the oxide used on DD disks is the same as single density... the main difference is FM vs MFM modulation yielding higher density recording rather than the physical media itself.

Was there any software produced that requires the use of a PAL VDP (9919) or different system clocking that has been done for the TI?

Unfortunately, none of these links seem to work.

plug and play is nice...