TI Gameshelf

[+Vorticon]

Hey guys I'm looking at moving away from Earthlink to a cheaper option. Given how minimalistic the TI Gameshelf site is, I don't think paying nearly $25 a month for hosting is necessary. There is a bewildering array of hosting options out there, and I was wondering if anyone here had a suggestion...

[+Ksarul]

Check with Don O'Neil (Lizard Hill). He hosts several TI sites. . .and he's part of the community.

[+Vorticon]

Check with Don O'Neil (Lizard Hill). He hosts several TI sites. . .and he's part of the community.

 

What's Lizard Hill? I would love to have a member of the community host the site.

[+Lee Stewart]

What's Lizard Hill? I would love to have a member of the community host the site.

 

Hoster of the WHTech site.

 

...lee

[+arcadeshopper]

Hey guys I'm looking at moving away from Earthlink to a cheaper option. Given how minimalistic the TI Gameshelf site is, I don't think paying nearly $25 a month for hosting is necessary. There is a bewildering array of hosting options out there, and I was wondering if anyone here had a suggestion...

Lizard Hill

www.lizardhill.com Don O'Neil is a long time ti community dude very responsive and responsible hosting provider

 

Greg

Sent from my LG-H872 using Tapatalk

[+arcadeshopper]

And arcadeshopper.com

 

Hoster of the WHTech site.

 

...lee

Sent from my LG-H872 using Tapatalk

[+OLD CS1]

Hey guys I'm looking at moving away from Earthlink to a cheaper option. Given how minimalistic the TI Gameshelf site is, I don't think paying nearly $25 a month for hosting is necessary. There is a bewildering array of hosting options out there, and I was wondering if anyone here had a suggestion...

 

I can.

[+arcadeshopper]

 

nice.. and if you still have issues I can't recommend Don's lizardhill.com hosting enough.. Great service cheap prices and no metering traffic just storage space and features

 

Greg

As I said last year

 

Sent from my LG-H872 using Tapatalk

[+Vorticon]

Thanks guys. I set up an account with Lizard Hill. It looks like a professional outfit and I can't beat $0.99 a month for full service hosting! It will take a couple of days for the domain name to point to the new DNS servers. There might be a temporary disruption of the site during that phaseout.

Thank you for the offer OLD CS1. Appreciate it

[+OLD CS1]

No worries. Yeah, I am "old fashioned" as I have no control panels, it is all .conf files and pico (yes, pico, not vi.)

[+adamantyr]

I use AWS. It's not too bad price wise. You could store the whole website in S3 and access it via Route53.

[+Vorticon]

OK site transfer is complete That was pretty painless... Sorry about the blackouts last night. In retrospect I should have uploaded the site to the new hosting service before changing the domain DNS. I think OLD CS1 would have fired me on the spot

[+OLD CS1]

OK site transfer is complete That was pretty painless... Sorry about the blackouts last night. In retrospect I should have uploaded the site to the new hosting service before changing the domain DNS. I think OLD CS1 would have fired me on the spot

 

Nah, that would fall under "NMP."

[ralphb]

Not sure if you're aware of this (or even initiated this), but the eyes of the (start-up) world are currently upon the TI GameShelf:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28576589

 

EDIT: For those not familiar, HN is a discussion forum where topics can be submitted and voted on.  The focus is on technology and the start-up scene, but occasionally some retro-computing topics are voted up.  The quality is generally very high.

Edited September 18, 2021 by ralphb

[matthew180]

Yup, just saw this on HN.  @Vorticon what's going on, any idea?

 

Edit: After reading the short thread, my take away is most people are clueless about computer history, and will make shit up based on their own experiences rather than take a few seconds to see if what they are saying is anywhere close to reality.  Multiple people think the 99/4A was "obscure", and some think there was little to no exposure outside of the U.S. and Canada.  At least a few more people are enlightened now.

Edited September 18, 2021 by matthew180

[+Vorticon]

No clue... I don't usually promote the Gameshelf anywhere. My guess though is that most people on HN are relatively younger with little exposure to vintage hardware, and it shows... I mean the TI is 40 years old after all!

Edited September 19, 2021 by Vorticon

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, Vorticon said:

No clue... I don't usually promote the Gameshelf anywhere. My guess though is that most people on HN are relatively younger with little exposure to vintage hardware, and it shows... I mean the TI is 40 years old after all!

Somebody recognized JetPac.

[ralphb]

14 hours ago, matthew180 said:

Multiple people think the 99/4A was "obscure"

I wrote "relatively obscure", because ...

 

... in my class and possible in my entire school I was the only one with a TI 99/4A.  There was only one other kid that was thinking of getting a TI 99, but then he heard that TI stopped manufacturing them, and got a VC20 instead.  No one having a TI 99 also meant that I had to swap programs with pen pals as far as Argentina to actually get any new programs.

 

... third-party software or hardware did not exist, there was only one German book not published by TI available, and after a while you couldn't even get TI carts anymore

 

... at retro fairs, Commodores and Ataris are plenty, but in all the years I've never seen a TI 99/4A, and only two carts in total.

 

... German ebay is a wasteland.  To get any non-basic stuff at all, I have to order from the US.

 

... my non-retro computing-interested work colleagues have heard of C64s and Amigas, but not of the TI 99/4A, or are aware that TI ever made home computers.

 

The TI 99 might not be obscure in the US, but in Europe (Germany) it pretty much was and is.

 

[+Vorticon]

Quite a bit of fantastic hardware came out of Germany though. I wonder if there were hotspots there, perhaps in larger cities?

When I got my TI console in 1981, I was living in Montreal, Canada, and I never once encountered a fellow TI users. I got all my info from Compute! magazine, whatever little there was... I doubt though Canada was a wasteland for the TI at the time, but with no internet and social media, finding other TIers locally was more a matter of good luck than anything else...

[+Ksarul]

When I first got to Germany in 1985, I didn't know any other TI local users. A couple of my TI friends from my previous tour in Germany were still in Stuttgart though, so I had people within a few driving hours of me. The base recreation center had a little hobby expo a couple of months after I arrived and I set up my TI there. After about an hour, there was a small crowd surrounding my table--it was the K'Town 99er's User's group (not the one located in the US--this was a military user's group). They had about 20 regular members and the group lasted until about 1992 when we were down to three remaining users. I was also connected with the local German user's group. Ten to fifteen of us met every other month. There was even an independent computer store in downtown Kaiserslautern that stocked stuff until the store itself closed down in 1990. I bought my Advertizer cartridge and several other European items there. The TI Treff at Duisburg in 1986 was the real eye-opener for the size of the German TI community though. That place was packed. I saw demonstrations of hardware from Mechatronic and from Atronic, GRAM cartridges from TI Club Baunatal, and so many interesting German TI things that I wanted that I had to ration myself. . .in the hope that I would find them again the following year. Even into the early 90s, the TI Treff was large enough to completely pack a large gymnasium. Germany was definitely not a TI wasteland. . .and the shelf of TI-related books I have in German were mostly from sources other than TI. A lot of them were released, although distribution was sometimes a bit more problematic, as some of them had print runs of only 100-200 copies.

[matthew180]

6 hours ago, ralphb said:

... in my class and possible in my entire school I was the only one with a TI 99/4A.

In the U.S. in 1982..84, I didn't know anyone else with a 99/4A either.  My aunt had an Apple ][e because she could afford one, one of my fiends had an Atari 400, another had a Timex Sinclair (ZX80) and his dad had a PC for work, and another had a C64.  At school the computer labs were all Apple ][e, as well as the computers at the library.  From my perspective everything was "obscure" when compared to the Apple ][e.

 

Based on Ksarul's account, he had a different experience in Germany with the 99/4A, so the truth is probably in the middle somewhere.  A lot of the high-powered PEB cards came from the German SNUG, so there must have been quite a few people with the 99/4A and PEB.

 

I wonder if "obscure" is something that comes from fact (like number of units sold, in this case), or it is really just people's overall perception of something?

 

I will consider myself a little better educated about it though, and in the future I will try to not be so cynical (or a hypocrite) about other people's comments.  My apologizes if anyone took offense to me posts.

[SteveB]

A class-mate and friend of mine had a TI99/4a when I was 14 .. our whole group of four friends bought one as well later in 1983. But we did not manage to connect with other TI users. This is why we "gave up" the TI and bought Atari 800XL in February 1985. 

 

In 1995 or 1996 I saw an announcement on the usenet-group comp.sys.ti about a german TI meeting just 50 miles away and contacted the author Oliver that I once used and still owned a TI99/4a and he replied, this is just what we are all about. So ten years later I got connected, bought a PEB from another user, some modules etc. But I missed all the other hardware enhancements inbetween like GRAM Cracker, SCSI, .. etc. This is perhaps the reason why I am a hardware purist. Add components is okay, like using FlashRom99, but not modifying things. Yet it took me until Corona hit to really dedicate time to my little treasure... and finally start to complete my teenager projects. 

 

So I agree with Ksarul, there were quite some TI users in Germany, but before the internet arrived it was hard to connect. Perhaps "exotic" would fit better than "obscure"? The majority of class mates had a C64 back in the days. They played a lot of games and I sometines joined them, a little envious about those games. I wrote my own stuff back at home .. and guess who made a career in IT?

 

[ralphb]

2 hours ago, matthew180 said:

I will consider myself a little better educated about it though, and in the future I will try to not be so cynical (or a hypocrite) about other people's comments.  My apologizes if anyone took offense to me posts.

No apology necessary, Matt!  My post sounded harsh, but I didn't intend it to be -- I just wanted to explain why I thought the TI 99 is not that widely known as other retro-computing platforms by Apple, Atari, or Commodore.  ?

[ralphb]

My parents gave me a TI 99 with cassette recorder for Christmas 81 or 82, mainly because I was so excited by Parsec before, and the C64 was still more expensive than the TI 99.

 

But later I barely was able to get an Extended BASIC, and relied on mail order for things like the PEB or Editor/Assembler.  I even almost ordered a Geneve, but mere weeks before its availability I decided to sell everything and go for an Amiga.  (My parents had to sue the mail order company, which was run by two students, to get the advance payment for the Geneve back.)

 

In the early 80s I didn't have any personal contacts to other TI users, as all of my friends had a C64.  The funny thing is that I lived in the same city as Michael Becker of snug, but without Internet, I had no idea.

 

I agree with SteveB, though, that "exotic" might have been a better adjective describing the TI 99/4A. ?

[+OLD CS1]

I was bullied, literally, over my TI. By Commodore kids. Actually made me more determined to stick with it and make it do things before I finally had to move on.