pixelpedant

My personal favourite would be Speecoder, as an LPC speech encoder/decoder/editor.

The NanoPEB is currently in stock in Arcade Shopper's store, which is generally our TI goods vendor of choice, around here. They also go up on EBay pretty regularly. A lot of people go with the TIPI these days instead, but the NanoPEB does remain my preference.

A TI-99’s composite signal is never noisy. It displays precisely the colours it means to. It just contains more signal decoration than less interesting video signals. If you're having trouble making out the image being displayed, this is because you have failed to use the officially mandated PHA4000 or PHA4100 colour monitors. Shame on you.

"If at first you don't succeed, alpha lock is probably on. Yeah, I know you don't remember pressing alpha lock. But somebody pressed alpha lock. And it sure as hell wasn't someone else."

In that regard, I vote Hunt the Wumpus for TI-99 game with the greatest contrast between cover art awesomeness and gameplay disappointment:

Yeah, I love to see the art we get here for new community games. Even when it's just a cartridge label somebody cooks up. But all the more so, when a developer goes above and beyond. Like Tursi did with the Dragon's Lair pack-in items, for example. I will say one thing against the original era TI 99 manuals, incidentally: as pretty as the cover art is, the insides sure aren't ? The colourful 2600 Buck Rogers and Star Trek: SOS manuals (and the Star Trek: SOS joystick overlay), put next to the plain old text of the TI-99 ones, do not flatter the latter:

I feel like the notion of “deceptive” manual/box art doesn’t really make sense until the era when game art as a central visual feature of boxes and manuals is actually a widespread phenomenon. With Unreal having been one of the vanguard there, with real game art featured pervasively and conspicuously (“actual gameplay screen”) as branding, with everything else really just window dressing for it. Where before that, you might get a few stills on the back, even in the TI-99's time, but they’re information rather than branding. I guess you could say Nintendo’s use of pixel art in its black box titles is prototypical to this approach of centrally featuring real game art as branding, but given the art is blown up, cropped, selective, and often straight up “reimagined”, I don’t feel like anybody looked at those as “screenshots” per se, even if they sometimes accurately represent the game’s pixel art. So I’m not sure they really go much further than the box art for Tombstone City or Hunt the Wumpus or Tunnels of Doom (with their semi-accurate artistic portrayal of gameplay). But yeah, in the TI 99/4A era, or really any time before the late nineties, I just look at game art as imaginative context, unless specifically represented otherwise. You can hardly accuse a text adventure of misrepresenting its graphics. And if someone looks at the cover for Moon Mine pictured above or the cover of Death Star Battle and thinks they’re looking at a gameplay still, I suppose there’s just no helping them :P

I've never been one to "display" a "collection", when it comes to games. I have a fair number of games. But they're mostly just stacked inconspicuously in book shelves and cassette racks, and/or kept in my storage room. And none of them (TI or otherwise) are particularly valuable. But I really like the look of the classic red box TI games. The way the manual art is on full display, and often quite wonderfully detailed/interesting. So I decided to decorate one of the walls of my den with a few of them, a while back. A couple, I'm nostalgic about, a couple I actively play, and a couple others somewhat arbitrarily thrown in. Now, I have the clear covers for all of the games for which I have the shells, I think, but they tend to be broken or badly aged. And they get in the way of the beautiful manual art regardless. So this was my rather silly/hacky solution for displaying some TI 99/4A games as close-at-hand, functional wall art. The ugly hack, basically, is just thick nylon thread and clear tape affixing it inside the box, to create a loop at each of the lower corners of the box which the manual can sit in. A $0 solution which gets the job done, as far as that goes. For me, it feels like a nice way to give my computing space a TI 99 flavour and put up some classic game art. Even though most of the rest of it's pragmatic rather than pretty. Of course, it would be easy to display the manuals without the shells and games, or display them with the beat-up and broken clear covers. But I feel like keeping the carts and manuals together makes sense. And I feel like the box really frames them nicely.

I figure they'll come in once people notice. There's also the fact that some people will always bid at the last possible moment.

Those things are horrendous. When they do work, lag's significant and picture quality is awful. And sometimes they just don't. So I would by no means treat that as an authoritative indicator of the TI 99's failure. Even if you haven't got an HDTV, would it be possible to test the TI 99 on a friend's HDTV? If not, as far as trustworthy upscalers go, the RetroTINK 2x is the most affordable upscaler which can correctly handle Composite video of this sort (and line-double/transcode it to 480p HDMI, which almost anything can handle). The Framemeister can as well, but is much more expensive (because it is hugely more feature-rich). The OSSC is also popular and relatively affordable, but does not handle Composite (which is in low demand, due to its offering the worst picture quality short of RF), so it won't be useful for an unmodified TI 99/4A, unfortunately (but is excellent for F18A-modded upscaling, since it's fantastic for 480p transcoding/upscaling). Results from built in HDTV upscalers can also be a bit all over the place. Literally anything can happen, including almost perfect (some lag) upscaling (from a fair number of Samsung sets), to things like the wrong colours, or no displayed image at all, or an entirely grey image. Because outright support-by-design for this type of non-standard video (in which every other scanline is drawn at 59.94kHz and the other half are never drawn) does not exist, on the HDTV market. Definitely, if I was in your shoes, I'd be looking at either taking the TI 99 to test on a Samsung or Sony or otherwise mainstream HDTV, or otherwise picking up a RetroTINK. Especially if you have other uses (you mention C64) for good upscaling. Seems a shame to replace every part in the thing without really knowing for sure that it's broken.

I'm sure any game you made for an unexpanded console would be awesome. But with 32k so readily and pervasively available, I figure why not use it? Unless you enjoy the challenge of 8K development, which is fair enough, and if so more power to you. The way I look at it, when an upgrade 1) requires no technical expertise or installation procedure 2) is readily available and regularly resupplied 3) is low in cost and 4) is original to the platform's heyday, so even purists can feel comfortable with it, there's just every reason to enjoy it. I do admit a certain giddiness at seeing amazing software made for the unexpanded console, just because I get to reflect on how amazing it would have been to me on my own unexpanded console, long ago. But in the present day? Let's revel in the possibilities presented to us.

Well, Terminal Emulator I works fine for me via FinalGROM. Though it doesn't actually do precisely what I appreciate TEII for, which is its speech synth feature set. In practice, I mostly muddle with custom vocab (and intonation and such) via my speech editor thingy, but TEII is the OEM solution (and Speecoder is the original hardware 3rd party solution). Trouble with TEII though is unlike XB, it doesn't provide a mechanism for outputting speech patterns themselves. Only for producing speech directly. But I'm getting a bit off track here

Thank you for pointing that out! I've also never had any luck with TEII on FinalGROM, though this didn't really matter, since I also have the cart. Indeed, I had the 1.2 firmware, and an upgrade to 1.3 allowed the listing to appear in the FinalGROM menu. So thanks for pointing it out, minty. Progress! Alas, now the program loads, but crashes on load (at the initial off white screen colour) if my NanoPEB is plugged in. The original cart works fine regardless of whether the NanoPEB (and consequent 32K) is plugged in. So something's still up. Curious. Ah well. Not the end of the world, as I say, since I can just use the original cart. But laziness certainly does argue for the appeal of just absolutely everything (well, except Dragon's Lair) running off FinalGROM.

Yeesh. On the bright side, as with printer ink, third party cartridges are very cheap, so you should have all you need for relatively cheap.

Yeah, I feel like the first party/third party/bootleg/homebrew distinctions can make sense in some contexts. I mean, those are pretty well defined in the case of say NES games, just due to the absence of magnetic media, the system manufacturer insisting on controlling all distribution, and the consequent necessity that bootlegs implement a circumvention device. But in the 80s home computing sphere, it's a bit weird. Granted, less so in TI's case, since they were more hands-on than some, and most popular original era games are mass-produced carts rather than magnetic media. But in an MSX or Speccy context for example, it really doesn't make much sense at all. I feel like it's mostly a case of language relevant to most popular gaming platforms of the era being somewhat erroneously extended to the entire market, when portions of the market don't really recognise these distinctions, and when, furthermore, in the present day, they've often become essentially meaningless.

Yeah, naturally the prints are monochromatic. So for best results, all images used should be made monochromatic as well.

I use this: http://www.dymo.com/en-US/dymo-label-software-v8-5-windows Which is not the latest version. But I've had no reason to upgrade. For a full list of versions (including Mac versions), see Support->Drivers & Downloads->View All, here: http://www.dymo.com/en-CA/labelmanager-pnp-label-maker

That's the one. It should perhaps be noted that I don't use the I recall somewhat streamlined software which came with it, but instead Dymo's general purpose Dymo Label software. And even still, adding graphics is slightly unintuitive (though intended functionality). Still, it gets the job done.

A DYMO LabelManager PnP. It's a USB label printer with no inbuilt label design features, but which can print arbitrary graphics or fonts from a connected computer. And in this case, the labels are white-on-black plastic, indeed. Which is 90% of the labels I use (or sometimes white-on-clear plastic, on my dark grey devices). With as much stuff to label as I have, I really do like to be able to use OEM fonts, or logos, or what have you.

Two Favourites: - Bouncy's Obstacle Course (great music, relaxing and pleasant) - Dragon's Lair (technical marvel) Honourable Mention: - Super Demon Attack (just an altogether really solid fixed shooter with interesting enemy patterns).

Here's where the cable actually runs to, incidentally: The objective being to have all used controller jacks permanently wired, with inputs all in one place (on the left side of my desk).

I very much agree. My solution as it is is to use a 90 degree DB9 adapter connected to a DB9 extension cable, connected to a Wico Atari joystick adapter (which is actually mounted a ways away). That does alright for space economy, but it's not the most elegant solution one could wish for. Necessary though, since my TI is on a rack, and so limited to 22" or so of horizontal space (which is enough for NanoPEB+Speech+TI+90-degree-DB9-adapter).

Currently a TI-99/4 up for auction. Don't see that every day. Curious to see what it sells for.

A lot of very careful labelling of front panels. But the Extron devices can in three important cases store presets in internal memory. So once configured, selecting a configuration (my TI99 being preset 1) is just a matter of sending "1." via RS-232, in the case of the 8x8 matrix switch which is the main concern, for example. Or, somewhat more complicatedly, sending "2127H1019/0470:0504;" to the VSC-500 to adjust the picture to my favoured TI99-suitable dimensions. I feel very strongly that my TI99 should be able to adjust its own CRT output picture aspect ratio

Well, though I've not switched to a TIPI yet, seven different signal routing/processing devices in my setup are controlled via RS-232, so I'm never not going to be messing around with RS-232, myself. Audio/Video signals aside, I've got more RS-232 connections than I do anything else. Even USB or PS/2. So that'll never go away, in whatever combination of functional and frivolous uses. Since RS-232 is what gives my TI99 the ability to dictate how it is displayed/routed.