What is the Holy Grail of the TI99 4/A World?

[+Ksarul]

9 hours ago, Tempest said:

It is kind of weird that the TI-99 never got a port of Choplifter as pretty much every other computer of the time did.

Actually, there was a TI port of Choplifter! TI demonstrated it in their Winter CES booth in early 1983--but it then just disappeared. I have a series of TI disks for the GSIM that include images for most of the later TI cartridges, but Choplifter! is not part of the set. Battlestar Galactica is also missing from that set, although it also apparently existed (it allowed two TI computers to play the game head-to-head).

[+Torrax]

The Parker Bros. ones I was wondering about were Super Cobra; 007 James Bond; and Astrochase.  We have the existance of the near production prototype of Tutankham.  So were there any other PB developer(s) working on the others?  Also Astrochase has been mentioned in the past. Even part of a cover of Enthusiastic Magazine (correct me if I'm wrong on the magazine name).  Did Sierra, Sega, Brodebund, and Activision get any prototypes done before disappearing from the TI-99/4A scene.

 

My current hardware holy grail is a working 5.25 DSDD disk drive.  All 6 of mine including 2 backups have given up the ghost. And the last 4 from e-bay were DOA.  Aging with worsening eyesight and the lack of solder skills have been hard to keep this hobby alive for me.  Even e-cycled a Geneve that had the board brown over the years and fail.  Lucky another friend from my old computer club had one in storage that was in great shape and gave me a good deal.  Now to get my CorComp MES9900 backup and running.  Getting better use of my arm that had the elbow shattered and rebuilt at the beginning of February. Feels like an arm now and stiff at the elbow. Using my cat as part of my physio at night as she always crashes beside me like roadkill with her feet up waiting for her nightly tummy rub of 15-20 min. One spoiled here kitty.

[+Torrax]

Wasn't Battlezone & Galaxian being done by Sega?  I thought John Philips mentioned something in an article of 2 Atarisoft games.

 

We need someone to write a nice little book on the software history of the TI-99/4A in it's final years of 1983/84. Ksarul with all his wonderful TI-Toys??

[JB]

As far as grails go, I'm a simple man and not super-into collecting... but I'd really like a 99/8 and a HexBus floppy drive of some flavor(be it the TI one or the Mechatronics one)

[InfernalKeith]

4 hours ago, Torrax said:

The Parker Bros. ones I was wondering about were Super Cobra; 007 James Bond; and Astrochase.  We have the existance of the near production prototype of Tutankham.  So were there any other PB developer(s) working on the others?  Also Astrochase has been mentioned in the past. Even part of a cover of Enthusiastic Magazine (correct me if I'm wrong on the magazine name).  Did Sierra, Sega, Brodebund, and Activision get any prototypes done before disappearing from the TI-99/4A scene.

 

My current hardware holy grail is a working 5.25 DSDD disk drive.  All 6 of mine including 2 backups have given up the ghost. And the last 4 from e-bay were DOA.  Aging with worsening eyesight and the lack of solder skills have been hard to keep this hobby alive for me.  Even e-cycled a Geneve that had the board brown over the years and fail.  Lucky another friend from my old computer club had one in storage that was in great shape and gave me a good deal.  Now to get my CorComp MES9900 backup and running.  Getting better use of my arm that had the elbow shattered and rebuilt at the beginning of February. Feels like an arm now and stiff at the elbow. Using my cat as part of my physio at night as she always crashes beside me like roadkill with her feet up waiting for her nightly tummy rub of 15-20 min. One spoiled here kitty.

I usually assume that if we see a reasonably close version of a classic from another platform hitting circa 1984-1987, that it started life as a WIP for one of the original developers, but I have no proof to back up that assertion.  I can't believe Junkman Junior is THAT close to Epyx's version to not have started life as their first step into the TI market.  

[Tempest]

1 hour ago, InfernalKeith said:

 I can't believe Junkman Junior is THAT close to Epyx's version to not have started life as their first step into the TI market.  

Didn't we find the real Jumpman Jr. prototype a few years back that included the Spellbound level?

[Bill Loguidice]

I've always been an every systems (computer and console, worldwide) collector, and that of course includes the TI-99/4a. I love hardware in general, but for me, I probably have the most interest in pursuing boxed software, particularly games. In that regard, I'd say the TI is one of the weaker platforms because there were very few major third party companies with particularly compelling software outside of a few notable exceptions like Infocom. There were of course many factors contributing to that, including TI's own ambivalence towards non-first party content and the platform's own reliance on expensive add-ons to necessarily expand its memory to a more competitive 48k. Even if the TI-99/4a hadn't been discontinued when it did, the 48K limit would have definitely affected third party support by the mid-80s, which is of course why something like the TI-99/8 would have been necessary. Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying that I think collectability (in terms of value of items) in the TI community is probably more hardware-centric than it is software-centric, at least in comparison to more popular platforms.

With all that said, I can say it's nice that the modern TI-99/4a supporters have done so much with expanding the platform. It's obviously far more usable and capable than anyone would have been dreamed imaginable back in the day. 

[apersson850]

Regarding Return to Pirate's isle I'm actually not sure about what happened to that program later. I was told back then that it was a prototype for a game that would be released on cartridge when ready. It was the first graphical adventure game I saw for the 99/4A. It loads an image from diskette each time you move to a new location. Then some additional graphics is sometimes painted into the image, depending on if that object is available on the location or not.

I got it from a contact I had at Texas Instruments, on a "don't show it to anybody else" condition, but that's probably not valid any more...

 

I understand that I should keep the working 5.25" DSDD drives I have as spares. I hope they still work - the original ones do, so I haven't had any need to try the spares for decades.

Edited June 1, 2023 by apersson850

[+acadiel]

On 5/31/2023 at 11:06 AM, digdugnate said:

did i miss something?

 

for rare-type stuff, isn't there a P-Code sidecar and some kind of Video Modulation-type sidecar that are relatively rare?

 

edit to add: ah, I see that @arcadeshopper beat me to that one.  😅

I shipped a PEB Video Controller card for @Ksarul either last year or the year before.  That’s a super rare one.  Louis Guion passed along his TI stuff to me before he passed away, And I sent Jim quite a bit of stuff from it.  I’m not as much a collector as Jim is - in fact, I sold him my entire CC-40 collection (for what I paid for it), but it’s just built itself back up again for some odd reason.  😂 

[Asmusr]

For me the holy grail is the ultimate game that hasn't been written yet.

[krslam]

Gotta be this little 1-of-a-kind gem, and it's all mine. Bwa-ha-ha.

[Tempest]

1 minute ago, krslam said:

Gotta be this little 1-of-a-kind gem, and it's all mine. Bwa-ha-ha.

 

By your powers combined, I am COMMAND MODULE!

[Tornadoboy]

Was there ever a "Texas Instruments Chainsaw Massacre" game? I remember trying to find it as a kid, though I suspect it never existed and was just confused with the Atari 2600 TCM game which did exist. 

 

My grail would be some kind of souped up higher performance new version of the 4a with HDMI/VGA out but completely and perfectly backwards compatible, something that doesn't take up a ton of space and has enough internal and/or SD storage that it'll pretty much hold every program that was ever written without have to swap cartridges or disks, though it sounds like the Geneve 2020 and a few other projects may fit that bill. 

 

[Atari2600PAL]

My current grail is a couple of these storage boxes (picture stolen from another thread!)

 

I currently have some plastic boxes but they waste space on my limited shelf space (am a full time carer so can only have my stuff in my own room so have a large bookcase & a 5 shelf rack for the main hardware)

 

 

 

[InfernalKeith]

Regarding storage and display, I have racked my brain for years to think of a good way to display boxed TI carts.  The Parker Brothers boxes look beautiful on a shelf, but the TI boxes are a sea of plain cardboard, and the plastic boxes are worse for stacking.

 

If I ever have my mythical Highlander loft with 15-foot ceilings for an office/workshop, I love the idea of an entire wall of front facing TI boxes, displayed in order of release, just a huge grid on the wall that you could go pluck the cart box from when yuo wanted to use it.  That's as much art installation as it is storage, and the amount of space it would require would be ludicrous.  Maybe if I ever make a TI museum.   

[Atari2600PAL]

2 minutes ago, InfernalKeith said:

Regarding storage and display, I have racked my brain for years to think of a good way to display boxed TI carts.  The Parker Brothers boxes look beautiful on a shelf, but the TI boxes are a sea of plain cardboard, and the plastic boxes are worse for stacking.

 

If I ever have my mythical Highlander loft with 15-foot ceilings for an office/workshop, I love the idea of an entire wall of front facing TI boxes, displayed in order of release, just a huge grid on the wall that you could go pluck the cart box from when yuo wanted to use it.  That's as much art installation as it is storage, and the amount of space it would require would be ludicrous.  Maybe if I ever make a TI museum.   

All my TI outer boxes and trays are just stored in a box in the garage

[+Torrax]

Not worried of displaying my carts so I'm using 3 large faux leather cassette cases to store them. Got them from Sears or Radio Shack back in the day.

[TiTom]

I would love to find, in the back of a Lubbock garage, a dusty box filled with audio cassettes. This isn't a collection of prototype games, but a collection of taped meetings recorded by a secretary for later transcription. On these tapes you can hear J. Fred Bucy being told that Bill Turner had been over-optimistic on the sales numbers and there was no way to price-cut their way into profitability. What kinds of words would have emanated from that stolid Texan? How did he decide that he was going to take over the division himself? What sound does a CEO make when hemorrhaging millions of dollars? I'm sure that this kind of thing doesn't exist, but one can hope.

[WhataKowinkydink]

10 hours ago, JB said:

I'd really like a 99/8 and a HexBus floppy drive of some flavor

The 99/8 would have to be the 2nd on my list after the Geneva :)

[+acadiel]

18 hours ago, Ksarul said:

Actually, there was a TI port of Choplifter! TI demonstrated it in their Winter CES booth in early 1983--but it then just disappeared. I have a series of TI disks for the GSIM that include images for most of the later TI cartridges, but Choplifter! is not part of the set. Battlestar Galactica is also missing from that set, although it also apparently existed (it allowed two TI computers to play the game head-to-head).

There's a slight view of the TI in this video here at :31 seconds in.  Looks like the tape messed up at the same time they were demo'ing the MBX.   Then it shows up again later on with a nice segment!    Gotta love the silver chromed motif they had going on the unit!

 

 

[+Ksarul]

20 hours ago, Atari2600PAL said:

My current grail is a couple of these storage boxes (picture stolen from another thread!)

 

I currently have some plastic boxes but they waste space on my limited shelf space (am a full time carer so can only have my stuff in my own room so have a large bookcase & a 5 shelf rack for the main hardware)

 

Actually, these boxes look really nice and are great from an access to the cartridges standpoint--but they waste a lot of their internal space to do so. Your plastic boxes store more cartridges than they would. I have one of them--and I really like it, but it isn't an ideal solution if you need to store a lot of cartridges.

[Tornadoboy]

The 99/8 seems to come up a lot, has any thought of trying to repro the motherboard? Or are there too many custom parts? 

[+OLD CS1]

27 minutes ago, Ksarul said:

Actually, these boxes look really nice and are great from an access to the cartridges standpoint--but they waste a lot of their internal space to do so. Your plastic boxes store more cartridges than they would. I have one of them--and I really like it, but it isn't an ideal solution if you need to store a lot of cartridges.

I certainly would not have them for space-savings: the branding and proper fit would be great.  But, any time I see them come up, they are always on the other side of the country from me in the five-times shipping cost multiplier zone.  There are also some smoked flip-tops which come up every so often.  Same locations, though.

[Atari2600PAL]

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

I certainly would not have them for space-savings: the branding and proper fit would be great.  But, any time I see them come up, they are always on the other side of the country from me in the five-times shipping cost multiplier zone.  There are also some smoked flip-tops which come up every so often.  Same locations, though.

My plastic boxes waste space as they are deeper than they need to be and because they make the cartridges visible I don't put anything in front of them thereby wasting the shelf space in front (though maybe I should put some stuff behind). I have other carts on other shelves either loose or in TI boxes and from an aesthetic (and dust) point of view I'd like to have boxes like that to store all of them in as they can hang over the shelf as well as stack if need be. (the 2 spaces in my lower box are for sneggit & return to pirate isle when they arrive from US). I take onboard the comments but these (or possibly the smoke ones with room for manuals) will remain my current grail... 

[pixelpedant]

Here is a better view of the Milton Bradley Expander (MBX proto) demoed at CES, as it appeared in Electronic Fun (April 1983):