pixelpedant

For software requiring no upgrades or special carts, I suppose Bigfoot is another option. Not terribly iconic, nor is it technically impressive, but a good game which is well liked, with a full-fledged attract mode.

Absolutely love Imagic's manual art, yeah. It's phenomenal. For that brief moment in time, they really took video game marketing to new heights. Love the Fathom manual, as well: And the Wing War art too (found only on the Colecovision manual, since all other versions were either cancelled or released as cheaply as possible with nearly no materials). I liked that enough that I had to make a TI-99 manual for it, and for its quite distinct TI version, which despite not being released, is complete and playable.

Dragon's Lair. No contest, for me. Will run on original hardware, but it does require a Dragon's Lair cart. Looks even better on a CRT. A pixel-for-pixel capture doesn't really do it justice. For games that will run on a TI-99 with original VDP and using a commonplace modern flashcart rather than original cart, Flying Shark or Pinball 99. But keep in mind, these are modern games which exceed the achievements of original era software. For a demo for the sake of a demo (which is consequently, very technically impressive), Don't Mess With Texas - the TI-99 Megademo. Now, having beat around the bush a bit, original era games featuring attract modes with simulation or scripting of gameplay are very rare. Games with title screens containing music are much more common. However, Cerberus has a very good attract mode, where the player takes over the ship immediately from within the attract mode, and jumps into gameplay. Championship Baseball has a nice one, but requires an MBX. For original era software which will be very familiar to anyone who has ever touched a TI-99, your best option is doubtless Parsec. It isn't strictly speaking a simulation of gameplay. It's just an endless scroll. But it's as iconic as anything gets, on the TI-99.

Nah, it was a Buy-It-Now item. Sold for $82.

Speaking of which, here's something someone here might actually be interested in: CC-40 Printer/Plotter (In Box, Untested, Poor Condition) https://www.ebay.com/itm/225237350191

Some huge bookseller on Ebay keeps on trying to sell an introduction to CC-40 BASIC which is freely available online (and rather uninteresting, on the whole) for over $200, and I have to wonder what kind of madcap formula or spreadsheet is coming up with this nonsense. I guess probably just a typical case of "this is uncommon" failing to be correctly counterbalanced by "yes, but nobody actually wants or needs it".

At least in TI LOGO, nothing is tokenised. It's all plaintext. The only exception is graphics data, which is stored ready to load directly into VDP. This makes it more or less the precise opposite of TI BASIC. Which stores program code in a format ready to be loaded directly into VDP, but with graphics and sound data usually contained within that as plaintext strings (inasmuch as CALL CHAR patterns are usually quoted strings and CALL SOUND arguments are usually unquoted strings, in TI BASIC).

In Extended BASIC, there is no independent sprite pattern table. There is a character pattern table which is also the sprite pattern table. Thus, CALL PATTERN doesn't need to copy data from the character pattern table to set a sprite pattern. It just needs to set the relevant character value in the sprite attribute table. Or such is my understanding.

Yes, CALL PATTERN is dramatically faster. CALL CHAR is XB's slowest graphical command by a fairly large margin. Where CALL PATTERN is one of its fastest.

This is my outlook these days pretty much, likewise. Almost all of its limitations are just fun challenges now. Not annoyances. Even the four sprite limit is specifically necessary to a couple of tricks I'm fond of. And even just the exercise of finding clever ways to work around the limit can be interesting, in the same way working around bitmap attribute clash can be. The one thing I would wish away, I suppose, is the SD disk controller as the de facto platform standard. There's nothing interesting to me about 90K disks. It's merely a tad annoying. Legends can still do its thing on two disks instead of one. But forcing users to swap (because targeting SD controllers was more or less necessary, under the circumstances) is just a minor aggravation, and is not actually technically interesting in any way.

Untested CorComp Micro Expansion up for bidding. Interested to see what that goes for, these days: https://www.ebay.com/itm/374329168283

Here is what I was able to find, though I can't find a copy:

Clearly, 99/4 was best TI-99 all along. But seriously, I do use the headphone jack on my 99/4 pretty often, when I take it out. So fair enough.

Another exceptional case, just because it's fun trivia: if the Terminal Emulator II cart is inserted (and regardless of whether any of its features are used), memory available to TI BASIC will reflect buffer use one in excess of that specified by CALL FILES, as it reserves a buffer for its own i/o purposes.

And even had they ever been mass produced, they would have been rather pointless. Given that external speech patterns (i.e., ones not stored in the speech ROM) could be used, and even in BASIC were supported by CALL SAY via Speech Editor from the get-go. The only benefit would be an ease-of-use benefit to end users without the means to compose their own new patterns. Which was a problem Terminal Emulator II solved by adding text-to-speech. But TI was evidently very sold on "solid state cartridges" being the solution to everything, from their 99/4 promo materials. So it's no surprise they tried to make speech a "solid state cartridge" technology too.

The rationale is a fun one, but the reality is that an appreciable number of people today are going to use hacked joysticks or single-connector adapters that are hard-wired as Joystick 1. That's always struck me as a pretty broken solution itself, as there are legacy games that only use Joystick 2 (e.g., Protector 2, Star Trek SOS, if I recall correctly). But it is what it is, and it exists. So I think it makes sense to develop for what's out there.

The way I look at it, if anyone ever takes this challenge all the way, for the purpose of a full-fledged game, however low resolution you need to go is just how low you need to go. Might as well accept that and make the best of it. If that means a screen which is 2/3 interface and 1/3 first-person viewport, so be it. RPGs (or dungeon crawls in general) with dungeon views occupying a relatively small proportion of the screen (with most of it being interface) are fairly common. So that might be one better context for such a thing, where it doesn't feel out of place.

More 99/4 promo materials: How to Enrich and Expand Your Family's World (6 pages) how-to-enrich-ti994.pdf And Texas Instruments Introduces the TI-99/4 Home Computer (12 pages) The TI Home Computer.pdf

Here's another interesting example of 9918A gameplay involving 3D textured maze environments: Tales of Popolon (MSX1) Graphics are bitmap mode, but with 2x2 "pixels".

I got that earlier likewise. Just appeared as big chunks of text. Corrected now, and appearing normally again. Couldn't say what the story is there.

Representing the 99/4 and the classic sidecar conga line on the convention floor. Nice!

Absolutely stunning game. Less stunning, and not a platformer, but another MSX game I feel like is ripe for a TI-99 port is Knightmare:

Most common overall/historically: WICO Trackball (via joystick port) Most commonly used today: Probably TIPI mouse Of historical note: Mechatronic Mouse and NanoPEB Serial Mouse However, no mouse has ever been a "must have" TI item. They're all pretty niche.

Personally, I feel like subdivision of forums is only desirable to the extent that it separates out discussion among different audiences holding different interests. And TI BASIC (for example) is of at least some interest to essentially all TI-99 development enthusiasts. Since it's pretty much the main function of the operating system of the TI-99. So it wouldn't make much sense to separate out TI BASIC discussion into its own development forum, to me. TI BASIC enthusiasts and TI Extended BASIC enthusiasts and GPL/Forth/Pascal/Logo/Assembly enthusiasts are not really different audiences, at least at this point.

Note as well that the 1979 brochure makes the promise of the modules explicit, even if it does not offer any details: