The TI's future, is it so bright, "We gotta wear shades?"

[TI-Sissy]

whats going on? i don't get on for a few days and you old guys go ape with new stuff.

[Omega-TI]

whats going on? i don't get on for a few days and you old guys go ape with new stuff.

 

You snooze, you lose. Come by more often!

[Wildstar]

I got a 32K RAM Expansion for the PEB. This would give me some breathing room in memory. This would get my TI-99/4A some working space...

[+Ksarul]

Definitely a good thing to have in there, Wildstar. At some point you might want to consider replacing it with an AMS memory board (there are several flavors of these, but they are all compatible extensions of each other). That one allows you to bank switch in the 32K space and can create (or run) some humongous programs (Rich did an RXB game that uses something like 900K of AMS memory). Mike Dudeck of Tex*In Treasures (mdude on eBay) told me he still has some of the boards on hand (he's still trying to figure out where he put them though) and I'm in the process of testing the next iteration boards (they should be available by spring).

 

Expansion Memory, Disk Controller, and RS-232 and you've got all of the core requirements. RAMDisks and other cards are useful too--but with the first three you've got a nice, expanded system going.

[Iwantgames:)]

I want a AMS memory board

[Wildstar]

I am looking around for them. I like the HyperAMS board with 16 MB memory option. Just where to get one or a SuperAMS with 16 MBytes. That's the trick.

[Wildstar]

Definitely a good thing to have in there, Wildstar. At some point you might want to consider replacing it with an AMS memory board (there are several flavors of these, but they are all compatible extensions of each other). That one allows you to bank switch in the 32K space and can create (or run) some humongous programs (Rich did an RXB game that uses something like 900K of AMS memory). Mike Dudeck of Tex*In Treasures (mdude on eBay) told me he still has some of the boards on hand (he's still trying to figure out where he put them though) and I'm in the process of testing the next iteration boards (they should be available by spring).

 

Expansion Memory, Disk Controller, and RS-232 and you've got all of the core requirements. RAMDisks and other cards are useful too--but with the first three you've got a nice, expanded system going.

 

Yep. I am looking to do so. I have an F18A VDP upgrade to install. I have one of those GreenArray GA144 evaluation boards being sent. It has two GA144 chips which each consists of 144 18-bit Forth 'computers' (also called F18A but not to be confused with the FPGA based VDP replacement). This would provide for some interesting processing and with it consisting of its own memory and resources, from which I can offload data and potentially tap into it as a form of extended processing and memory resource.

 

-- URL link to some information about the GreenArray chips and Evaluation board:

http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/index.html

http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.html

 

 

I also have a Mini Memory cartridge coming. It has its benefits.

 

I'll see if I can get one of those next iteration boards from you when you have them available. Consider it a sort of "pre-order" in a sense.

Edited November 4, 2014 by Wildstar

[Retrospect]

"What would I like to see"

 

I would love to see, NEW ti99 consoles being made by someone. See, eventually, the original hardware is going to fail. If someone had the know-how (and there are people on here that do) and the time, or money, new consoles could be made - even if they were just a board, I/O sockets and a keyboard. They could probably be made to accept either old cartridges with a big slot, or in it's place a USB slot for memory cards with cartridge images on them.

 

Just a little board, that you plug in, and beep, you're away.

 

My biggest fear, on the subject of the TI, is that in years to come, nobody's gonna know even what a TI is , or was .... we MIGHT be the last generation of people to use such a computer.

[gregallenwarner]

The most effective way to produce a TI-99 replacement would be to program a system on a chip using an FPGA. Many other classic systems have been implemented on FPGA's, so there's no reason the same couldn't be done for the TI.

[+mizapf]

What about implementing a floppy controller on a FPGA? This would definitely be helpful to get to a new, more powerful controller card while real chips are getting more and more difficult to find. Our controller emulations in MESS could serve as blueprints (although, of course, there is still a good way to go until this is formulated in VHDL).

[gregallenwarner]

I've thought about an FPGA floppy controller, since I've been studying programmable logic as of late. However, what I'd expect in a product like this is full backward compatibility with the existing drive controllers, so that none of the software will need to be modified. What I am lacking is a fully documented description of those disk controller chips and their theories of operation. But if you could find something like that, theoretically, a disk controller could certainly be built in that manner.

Edited November 5, 2014 by gregallenwarner

[+mizapf]

The C++ implementation that I committed for the HDC9234 emulation in MESS some weeks ago actually goes down to the level of watching incoming flux level changes. The only thing to consider would be that the emulated floppy drive in MESS delivers the flux changes as time intervals (like 4000 nanoseconds until next change, then 2000ns until next change etc.) which would need to be linked to the changes in real time, but this should be possible. I'd be brave enough to claim that the WD17xx emulation and this HDC9234 very closely emulate the actual processing in the chips.

 

Note that MAME/MESS have moved to Github: https://github.com/mamedev/mame

[+OLD CS1]

This has been on my mind for a while, as well. Since the behavior of the WD177x is fairly well-documented, backward compatibility does not seem like it would be much of a problem, while adding in a but of additional functionality. In particular since many of the 177x chips are backward compatible with the older formats. I would think the 1772 would be a good framework as it supports the DSDD formats and below (used in Commodore 1571 5.25 and 1581 3.5 drives,) but is capped at 250kbps which means that HD is out of the question without special drives. Which then draws upon the dark spirit of Amiga HD drives which slow the drive rotation with an HD disk inserted (HD is 500kbps, and specially-modified or -designed drives are needed to cut the rotational rate in half.)

 

NOTE: The Amiga does not use a WD177x chip but has a custom controller which is limited to 250kbps.

[Omega-TI]

 

NOTE: The Amiga does not use WD177x chip but has a custom controller which is limited to 250kpbs.

 

Just to toss an extra log onto the fire and get people thinking, the Atari crowd managed to make a HD partition/emulator on an HxC.

 

http://hxcmount.atomas.com/

 

I wondered if something like that could be done in just software on the TI.