How the TI-99/4a computer sold 2.8 million yet failed
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- Опубліковано 30 тра 2024
- Play these games on your device!! Emulators can be found here (unaffiliated link):
www.99er.net/emul.shtml
(I like Win994a simulator and Classic99 on Windows)
In 1978, Texas Instruments missed an opportunity to define computing architecture. However, we still got the TI-99/4a from it.
Today we will checking out some vintage computing hardware - the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a home computer that was released in 1981. Today we'll be learning about it's history, how history could have been different, and also doing a teardown to see inside it, as well as playing several games.
Gameplay Includes: TI Invaders, Car Wars, Jawbreaker II, BurgerTime, Tombstone City, Blasto, Hunt the Wumpus, Munch Man, A-Maze-Ing, and Parsec
Interesting Reading:
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_I...
- spectrum.ieee.org/tech-histor...
- spectrum.ieee.org/tech-histor...
More:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-990
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMC_DeL...
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/...
www.roylongbottom.org.uk/mips.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruc...
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Satya Yuga - Наука та технологія
I totally forgot the "Lift" setting on Parsec adjusts your speed/distance for the ships vertical movement. After this I looked it up, and the 1, 2, or 3 number keys set it - 3 is fastest and default, but set it to 1, and the fuel tunnels are manageable.
InstaBlaster.
Came to post the same thing.
I always knew that but then my family did buy the game back in the day and I did read the instructions and pressing 1 makes refueling so much easier, particularly on the longest and most challenging tunnel.
The Ti 99 4a was my first computer and your video brought back a lot of memories. I mowed a lot of lawns to buy it and eventually had the tape drive, floppy drive, hard drive, modem, extended basic, voice synthesizer, and expansion bays. I think I had about every game you could get to in cartridge or download to tape or later floppy. I loved the machine and ultimately lost it when I got married and had left it at home where my mom got rid of it. I would love to have it to this day. It was my favorite computer ever. In so many ways i found it to be superior to every other machine I used around that same time. I used the Apple IIe, Commodore 64. It wasn't until my Amiga that I felt I truly had a superior system. I also had a PC Clone XT 8088, which was IHMO inferior to them all. It was years before PC would reach the level of graphics quality that all those other systems had early on.
Thanks for the video! It was a great walk down memory lane.
Didn't like most of the Ti 99 games (I was a toddler though), but totally agree with all your points about it and other systems (actually just wrote about the same thing in a more wordy way before scrolling down to your post)
Ditto. But my main use was programming because of the strong support for sprites and the ease of using them in extended basic.
@@PeterRichardsandYoureNot dang, the TI was really powerful for the price, but TI Basic is the hardest high level language I've ever used--You must be dang smart. It wasn't until the ultra smooth Amiga that sprites, specifically variable sprite collisions, intrigued me--for their statistical modeling value.
@@PeterRichardsandYoureNot For writing games the Ti was basically useless with out the extended basic cart. That cart was a $100 and some change back then. A impossible sum for a 10 year old to get. But I got it. I worked my ass off for it but in 6 months after getting the Ti I had my extended basic cart. Man, the things you could do on that computer with that cart. So many additions it added to the basic language and just made the computer a joy to write games on.
I really do miss those days of going to the arcade, watching a game for hours to learn the in and outs of the game. Then going home and basically porting the program from scratch.
Jeff Hyche TI could probably have improved the prospects of their home computer if Extended BASIC was the default BASIC - the C64, for instance, required a lot of peeking and poking to do anything graphical. So TI marketing could have pushed that in their war against Commodore - but that is just one of many mistakes they made
My first computer at 10 years old. I think this PC was a lot of people’s first computer back in the day. Personally it introduced me to a keyboard (typing capability) and basic (programming capability). These things provided a springboard to eventually having a career in the tech industry. I owe a lot to this computer. Just bought another one off of Ebay 40 years later. Going to re-live Parsec with the voice synthesizer. Going to listen to the synthesizer voice with extended basic and enjoy it. Thanks for the video. It is a great review of a computer that meant and still means a lot to many people.
I enjoyed this. You had some harsh words about the architecture, but I'm glad I chose the 99/4A at age 12. It was the machine and architecture that supported me through school and university, later with the Myarc Geneve 9640. The 9900 was almost designed as a multitasking architecture.
I'm still involved with TI User Group UK to this day.
Awesome video! I LOVED my TI-994A! Tunnels of Doom, Star Trek, Parsec, TI Invaders, so many classics. I'd program that all day with COMPUTE magazines by my side. My friends would come over to play Tunnels of Doom, such an incredible game! Good times. :)
Wow!
What a trip down memory lane!
I spent a good part of my teen years on the 99/4a and a lot of that was playing Parsec and Tombstone.
I still have my TI-99/4a, along with the Speech Synthesizer and the Peripheral Expansion Box. They are living in my basement with the last time I dug them out was I think in 2001.
Thanks for the memories!
my parents were one of those people who got one of the late beige 4a's at a discount for $50 (or so) prob in 1984 after TI's exit from the market, and it changed my life and most likely shaped my career
This was my first computer. I'm looking for one now because it reminds me of my late dad. It makes me want to get one cause it's reminding me of good childhood memories. Love n miss ya Dad! 😢
Parsec! That was the TI99 game--the only one that truly showed off what the TI99 could do that no other computer of the time could match. However, my hands actually started doing the motions to control your cars when I saw them (dang, 40 years later and it's limbic), and burger time was much better on the TI than the Commodores V20 and C64. Dang, I played hours of Tombstone too--I can't believe I remember how to play. I think Hunt the Wumpus came with the computer? I wasn't looking at the screen when you loaded cat maze and I remembered it very well from the sounds, but it was way too difficult after a level or to for me as a toddler. There was a much wider variety of enjoyable games for Commodores, even with their inferior graphics and audio--until the superior Amiga opened a whole new world of computing...Unlike the Commodores, I can't think of a single TI game that would make it worth running an emulator (My family still plays C64 M.U.L.E., Mail Order Monsters, Space Taxi, Summer Games, Winter Games...And the Amiga has at least a dozen still great games, including the GOAT--Earl Weaver Baseball)
The only other thing I remember about TI 99/4A was that TI Basic is probably the hardest high level programming language I've ever used. Apple Basic was by far the most annoying, with it's lousy keyboard and the lack of a backspace. Commodore Basic was so dang easy many kids just went ahead and learned C for more of a challenge. That most TI games came on a cartridge like the 2600 instead of on tapes, also made them much harder to hack, so it just wasn't much of a computer learning system.
IBMs cost about as much as a decent car if you had one with the same simple audio reproduction and color graphics as the TIs or Commodores--I'm not sure how they could even be called home or personal computers for any middle class American. Even a decade later it would cost you $1500 for a low-end x86 clone with rudimentary color graphics and a rudimentary ability to replay recorded sounds. So the IBM is a very curious comparison.
The shielding looks much stronger than in other computers of the same era.
I agree 👍
Can the shielding be left out??
some tiny corrections: the 9900 was a bipolar (I²L) processor, MOS. The IBM PC project officially started in early 1980 with the extremely un-IBM-like goal of doing a product in less than a year, though IBM had previously explored alternatives (in 1978 they were designing the Datamaster, for example, and selected the Intel 8085 for it). The price for the TI99/4 included a color monitor, while the TI99/4A came with the RF modulator instead.
I have a NOS TI99/4a in vintage condition. I love it! A fun retro computer. I had one when I was a kid. This was my first computer.
Same here hoss.
Whereas Pac-Man plays until it crashes when the score runs out of memory space, Munch Man actually has an ending. In the last stage the character is shifted one tile and instead of filling the maze you actually eat the maze, and then after that he's free.
When my father bought our Ti-99/4A at the end of 1981 I never realized it was 16-bit. In fact I wasn't aware of the bit concept of home computers at the time so I didn't know standard home computers of the time were 8-bit until the introduction of such 16-bit computers in the mid '80s like the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. Even in the mid 1980s I assumed the TI was 8-bit since it performed more like one and the graphics were 8-bit quality and you'd hardly mistake it for the Amiga. It wasn't until years later when I went online I discovered the TI was 16-bit.
their CPU architecture was a dead-end, though - the Motorola was heads and shoulders way above TI and Intel. TI tried to bring a multi-tasking concept they used in mini computers down to micro computers. It depended on designing some special fast RAM - but other CPUs eventually started putting cache memory right on the CPU die, and TI's approach would have never kept pace and competed against that
There really was no selling point in the TI being 16-bit because there were no benefits in it. Buying an Atari ST or Amiga, different story. But in 1981 my family didn't want a TRS-80 (my mother had experience with one in college and she called it "Trash 80", turns out she was hardly alone), the Apple II was too expensive, the PET seemed bulky and outdated for 1981, so the TI-99/4A it was.
That memory expansion module actually did solve many of the shortcomings of the ti99 system,but you had to make sure that it was secured tight in place or otherwise it could crash the system,i think texas instruments had no other choice then dropping down the price of those systems,otherwise they would,ve still end up with a large inventory of ti99 systems and maybe just maybe would,ve lost more money into renting costs of those wear houses,so i think they did the right thing.
Agreed - I got an aftermarket add-on mem module and it's opened up more possibilities on the machine. I still love my 99/4a
Enjoyed the video. I recall the "exit" from the home market was Summer 83, part of the C64 price war, after a huge loss (I remember the news story before going back for my last year in college) with stores subsequently (1984?) blowing them out for $50ea. A 99/2 was announced (Computers & Electronics magazine), but I never saw one.
Ive read stories of folks who got major deals on them at the end. Kinda reminds me of when Sega exited the console hardware space and the Dreamcast dropped to below $50. That's when I got mine 😂
@@VortexGarage The "deal" TI's had cases that were made out of Plastic. I got a white one in that sale. It powered up and worked for about a week before it wouldn't power up anymore. That one might still be in my basement as well.
Thank you for a detailed view of the TI994/A. It brings back a lot of memories.
The early TMS9900 used a hermetic ceramic package which was much more expensive than the plastic package (show here) that came later.
The address and data busses were 16 bits wide which made the chip very easy to incorporate in new designs but it took a lot of real estate on the mother board. It was awkward to interface the mother board to accessory boards because of the wide busses.
TI eventually developed an 8 bit version of the micro which had similar performance because of a more sophisticated architecture and it was much less expensive but it came too late to save the home computer.
A hardware and software disappointment was the so called GROM chip (game rom), supposedly for games but it was too slow for use with the internal Basic program language. The good games were programmed in assembly language and they performed very well.
The TMS9900 was fun to program in the late '70's but it didn't have the potential to become a high performance PC in the '80's.
Parsec was the ultimate game for the TI994/A. The speech output was considered state of the art at that time. The graphic effects were outstanding. It was better to use the keyboard buttons for control rather than the joystick.
(TI leveraged their speech technology to create the popular Speak and Spell. )
When entering the refuel tunnel in Parsec. try pressing 1 & 2 keys, that will change the sensitivity of your spaceship .. 3 will get you back to normal.... notice the "LIFT 3" text
I have a voice modulator and the 2 foot tall expansion bay for the ti
Awesome video. So many memories. I remember the earlier days of having more generic games with high quality, Alpiner, Parsec, Munch Man, TI Invaders, A-Maze-Ing, Hopper, Slymoids, and Tunnels of Doom.
Finally getting Donkey Kong and worth the wait, Burgertime and Congo Bongo. Imagic titles that blew away other ports. Fathom, Super Demon Attack, and Microsurgeon, possibly the greatest TI title ever maybe tying with Tunnels of Doom.
My friends had Atari 800 and C64, but everyone in the neighborhood came to our house to play video games. The Speech Synthesizer probably had a ton to do with that.
Good stuff. Brings back a lot of memories. I had to write down by hand or memorize code until I had enough money to buy a tape drive.. in the end, the limitations outweighed the benefits. The platform was not embraced by the home developer market like the Apple ii was...so, time to move on came to be. Even with the cool voice synthesizer programmable through extended basic.
Note to publisher. Please move your teleprompter higher or nearer the lens cause following your eyes as you speak is painful while you look down and away to get the next bits of info/
A few audio clips got cut - nothing major so won't re-upload. But commentary that TI BASIC is basically built off of Dartmouth BASIC, and that TI Invaders is a take on the classic "Space Invaders" game, made specifically by TI and with some tweaks of their own. See, nothing major lost by dropping those two tidbits by accident :)
TI says you're forced to use poke and peek but without them, actually programming the machine is harder.
Excellent video. I love my Ti99
Lift 1 for the refuelling tunnels, Lift 2 for the asteroid fields, Lift 3 for everything else.
Also, I discovered way back in the days of olde that if you start the game by crashing your ship on various objects on the ground, there is a good chance that after either the first wave of Swoopers or Urbites you will get a wave of Killer Satellites. I seem to recall the sign that the bug was triggered was a brief little graphical glitch in the to right area of the screen when you crashed.
I'm not convinced the TMS9900 would have make it big like the 8088, 8086 chips did. The 68k chips, now we are talking. Now of course it's all about ARM.
I agree, seems there were too many architectural issues with the TMS9900. Still amazes me to think how computing would have changed if 68k chips were ready for the IBM PC. Would we even have cared about x86 at all? As for ARM, 10-15 years ago I would not have guessed it would be where it is today...
Parsec with the voice synthesizer module or the Terminal Emulator II speech synthesizer was simply amazing for the time.
I had a preteen / early teen crush on the voice of the ship's computer.
Great video! Do you still plan to do the full teardown at some point? Thanks.
I had a Tandy Color Computer, but the power supply was not regulated -- so when my mom turned the dryer on downstairs, the computer power supply fried.
then I was faced with sending it back to Radio Shack for repair or buy another computer.
I bought the TI 99/4a and I always consider this my first computer -- I learned so much about programming and the nuts & bolts of peek & poke.
But that was not Object Oriented Programming in those days ... It was line by line by line.
Later on that original TI died I got another one, but to my surprise, and disappointment, it was that ' off white' version. I just didn't like it as much as the original.
Shortly; thereafter, I moved on to other brands and eventually to building my own that was a Windows based system, and even an OS/2 system ( became an Apple operating system).
But this video bring back a lot of great memories - I had sooo many cartridges and the expansion box with everything. Oh,, the modem 300 bps was ' state of the art' LOL!!
Compuserve .. America Online ... the land of the BBS ....
I always thought the 99 was the Delorean of 8bit PCs. I guess I’m not the only one.
Star Trek was a fun game. It was based on the arcade game where you fought against klingons.
I had completely forgot about loading programs by cassette.
My first computer when I was 10. We got it during the big sale (I guess that was the $100 off coupon). I typed in many programs from Compute! and other books back then, which set me on my career to be a software developer. It's a little interesting how little love (at least on UA-cam) the TI gets. This video has less than 4,000 views. Another UA-camr has released dozens of very in-depth videos on the TI, including detailed histories of various publishers and their software. Most of his videos don't even have 1,000 views. There doesn't seem to be much interest in it (at least watching videos about it) considering how many people used this computer back in the day. Our 8th grade computer lab was full of them.
Finally, if you haven't yet, check out the Dragon's Lair port to the TI. It's pretty amazing (even though a cartridge with that much memory in 1981 would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, although the technology didn't even exist).
The assembler CS course in my undergrad in the late 80s taught on the 68000 precisely because of the chip’s architecture.
Playing Parsec without the speech module is missing out on half of the fun of that game 😀
Especially with how the tiny monaural tv speaker made it hard to tell what the speech was saying.
"PRESS FIRE TO BEGIN"
"ENEMA DETROYED"
"EXTRA SH*P"
The music on Burger Time was maddening. Not too many people had the speech synthesizer I guess. Parsec without it isn't the same.
I think the real reason that the TI failed was it was so difficult for a kid to upgrade to a floppy drive. I don't really know, but I never got a floppy and my family got a Leading Edge pc clone before even considering putting more money into my TI. I think more people got C64 floppy drives, were they cheaper than TI floppy drives? My school in IL had a lab with Apples II and IIe with double floppy drives. The Apples were always better than either the TI or C64 and just different than the IBM PC... My middle school in California had a lab with C64's with hard drives. And now in 2022 for the first time on my production server I don't have a hard drive, just solid state technology. I never actually met a kid with an Apple at home until the Macintosh first came out, and that family didn't even know how to use a computer.
I can agree with this. Growing up the TI was more of a cartridge machine in my eyes. Writing basic on it was fun but as a kid writing it to tape was annoying. We had an IBM clone with disks and school had Apple IIes. Also the C64 had the 1542 drive. To me I didn't even know as a kid that the TI had a disk drive option - and if I recall it'd have to be in big expansion cabinet that most would not be interested in springing for. So my experience sounds very similar to yours with this machine.
As a Ti user from that time I can tell you every Ti user loathed this keyboard. Not because of how small it was or the feel of the keys but the lay out of the reset switch. If you look closely at the right hand side of the keyboard. you will see at the top on a over lay the word "Quit" above the += key. To access that function you had to press the "fctn" key in the bottom right hand side of the keyboard, it was the reset key. To display the "+" character you had to press shift = key to get that character. The sift key was right above the fctn key on the keyboard. This meant if you where not very careful while programming and missed the shift key and hit the fntn key when you wanted to display a + sign, you would reset the whole computer.
Many a Ti programmer has had a 100+ lines of code in the computer and go to add two number together only to hit the fctn key instead of shift. Then hear that 'beep' the computer makes when reset. Trust me on a Saturday night with the radio blaring, you in the middle of a program and you hear that 'beep' because you missed the shift key. That is the loudest sound in the universe.
Older computers were so unforgiving, it's amazing how easily hours of work could be lost. The story above and that keyboard setup is one egregious example indeed!
Exactly! keyboard torture!
New subscriber here, just wondering, do you have an update video on the 1965 mercury?
No, but I can make a quick one. It paused big time as I was cleaning it and found extremely bad rust in the back end including frame rot. But lately been thinking of pulling it apart and saving it. For now it's under a cover on a concrete pad.
My dad bought this car in the early 2000s and it came from a rust belt state. It got worse after it was driven a few years and parked outside. But I don't see them often and think it's saveable!
@@VortexGarage I watched all of the videos you posted before and it looked pretty good but frame rot is no good! I was just wondering about it. I really like 65 mercurys, that why i asked lol
Why did you hot-swap the carts? You shorten the lifespan of both computer and cartridge when you do that.
Another undocumented hack I found: When playing with the keyboard (yeah, I don't like the joysticks), go to the top of the screen. Hold down the Left arrow, and then while you're going backwards, hold down the Up Arrow.
4km
Is it necessary to build an Os meanwhile there was window for PC and Linux for Mobil phone..?
I had " Hunt the Wumpus."
I wonder what someone could design today using mostly the same parts but without the limitations put on it by the sloppy design.
the 994a was my third home pc and i was the chair of the local ti group in portland or. another thing that killed the 99 was the failure of ti's next generation to be compatable with the pre existing expansion box and it was never produced.
Can you expand on this? What wasn't compatible? You mean there was going to be a next TI but it never came out?
I don't really see selling 2 million units a failure. Smart choice to pull out before the loss became large is a win for the company.
The TI's failing wasn't due to the Vic 20 -at least initially, it and the Vic dropped their prices because of the Sinclair 1000, which for a time was the best selling computer in the US. This scared Commodore and TI into radically drop their prices, Commodore could just about manage this drop due to their control of the IC's in their machine, TI could not fully however and began to sell their machine at a loss just to move stock.
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 and I had fun programming that one at an early age. I then moved on to the Atari 8-bit followed by a CoCo3. I have had a TI for A few years now with three games named Burgertime, Parsec, and Treasure Island. Games are OK compared to what I'm use to but I'm still trying to find that WOW factor.
That cartridge mechanism should have been how the NES was cartridge was done. Instead it had a flaky, unreliable way of loading. These Texas computers seem good, with nice sound and video, cartridge, tape loading. What's not to like?
The standard TI joysticks were awful and I never liked how they felt. In 1984 my father bought a converter by WICO that allows Atari joysticks to be used on the TI and believe me, playing on quality Atari compatible joysticks were so much better. Then years later I found out the Sega Genesis controller was Atari compatible because I plugged it into my Atari 800XL and it worked, so that meant I could use it on the TI-99/4A so long as it was hooked to the WICO converter.
I recently added an atari adapter and use some atari compatible joysticks now - much better!
Parsec it is best to use the speech module you will hear messages like enemy attacking and good shooting you might get a good shot as well. You will get other messages about the level you advance to. And other messages as well. 73
15:19 My how things have changed.
21k
First thing first was monitor Monocoque and computer itself
You didn’t explain why TI couldn’t compete.. how much cheaper the new model was to manufacture.. sales by year... the disk drive..
The real reason as I think back more was the C64 hard drive was easier to get/afford than the TI floppy drive. It was the next step in tech back then, truly a big thing to have a floppy drive. Do you remember the cost difference between the TI floppy and C64 floppy? My last TI program was a check book balancer that I was trying to overcome the limits of the tape drive by loading all the data into a really long array into RAM so I wouldn't have to keep pressing play on the tape drive, so I could just load the program then save the program at the end... I never finished that program but recently, in 2021, found my old computer tapes from 1984/85 that I treated like gold.
A little bit of random PC history.
Imagine IBM had picked Motorola and given them a bit more time and or co-investment.
PS: found this video on the right side recommended list after watching Eben Upton - Life Before Raspberry Pi (2016)
ua-cam.com/video/RSnaxD2HSdc/v-deo.html and looking up the Hunt The Wumpus game.
It was fine if you just wanted to play some cartridge games. But it was not good for much else due to the convoluted design.
parsec is way better with a speech synthesizer
Dammit, remove the CRT high-pitch noise!!!
I just died.
You're really bad at playing burger time. It's ok. I am too.
I'm definitely bad at many of these games! I need more practice, which is fun at least!
The INSANE memory design in the TI-99/4athat negates most of the TMS9900 CPU power. I worked as a programmer at a company that used the 9900 mini computer which was fast and awesome! The guy that design the TI-99/4a should have been fired for incompetance!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Btw the MC68000 was at the time the UTTER BEST CPU on the planet ....IDIOT IBM!!!!!!!!!!!!