MBX games

[OX.]

The following MBX games were made specifically for use with the ti99 console + MBX unit :-

 

.TERRY TURTLE'S

ADVENTURE

 

.I'M HIDING

 

.CHAMPIONSHIP

BASEBALL

 

Does anyone know if there was ever any "cracked" versions of these titles produced to work without the MBX unit as none of the current emulators have MBX support.

Edited July 1, 2012 by OX.

[kl99]

not that I know off. Without the mbx console those games aren't making much sense.

[rocky007]

i don't agree totally : many of MBX games ( if not all ) could be playable with standard TI keyboard and speech recognition isn't necessary....

[Tursi]

One (potential) problem is that the MBX unit had a 6809 CPU in it. I don't know if games uploaded code to the 6809 or not, but if they did, they won't work anyway. Modifying the games to use different controls would be difficult, I think you'd need a dedicated fan to do that.

 

[kl99]

@rocky007: many emulators run all the mbx cartridges that don't explicetely need the mbx console. but OX. was asking about the 3 carts that really depend on the mbx plugged in, otherwhise they won't even start.

[+acadiel]

The 6809, eh? Suppose they didn't want to open a can of worms and use the 6502. :-)

 

A while back, I posted the actual MBX carts in dumped form that I got from SNUG. I think there was only one missing from the entire collection. But they had to be manually dumped, according to them, as nothing we had could technically copy them due to the RAM/ROM bank switching in place. Not sure about the actual architecture of the cart, but it was pretty non standard.

[Tursi]

It's unusual, but not too tricky. The notes I ended up putting into Classic99 note basically:

 

>6000 - >6BFF = Fixed cartridge ROM (first bank)

>6C00 - >6FFE = 1k of RAM (-2 bytes)

>6FFE - >6FFF = bank switch register (write bank index to >6FFE as a byte value)

>7000 - >7FFF = switched in ROM bank

 

So, 3k of fixed data, 1k of RAM, and 4k of bank switched data. I didn't verify that the RAM was used on the titles I have, but they run in this config.

 

Not sure why they chose the 6809, it was used in so few systems. Besides the arcade, the only home systems I know that used it were the Radio Shack Color Computer and the Vectrex.

[rocky007]

One (potential) problem is that the MBX unit had a 6809 CPU in it. I don't know if games uploaded code to the 6809 or not, but if they did, they won't work anyway. Modifying the games to use different controls would be difficult, I think you'd need a dedicated fan to do that.

 

it's really amazing to have the same power than Dragon 32 into a "joypad" for our TI99 !

The A/D converter is directly connected to the 6809, so i suppose that the speech reconization is done by software, and need a lot of power.

[kl99]

hm, there are emulators for the 6809 out there. mame (mess) included 6309 emulation in their project a while ago. 6309 is compatible to the 6809 as far as i know. so not too much is missing for mess supporting ti99 with mbx console emulation???

[Tursi]

MESS should have a 6809 in there too, since I know it emulates the Vectrex and I think it emulates the Color Computer. Plus it derives from MAME and a lot of arcade machines used it, as far as I know.

[kl99]

"Opening this beast reveals an MC68A09 processor, 4K of 6116 2K × 8 CMOS RAMs, a

8K × 8 Mask programmed ROM, a General Instrument SP1000 Speech Synthesizer Chip (I don't know

if it's a TI licensee or not), an MC6821 parallel port chip, and two ADC (analog-to-digital converter) chips

(ADC0809 and ADC0831)."

[source Cyc DVD]

 

The GI SP1000 is doing speech encoding and speech recognition, i see it as the key chip that will not be easy to emulate.