10 Amazing Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Exclusives
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- Опубліковано 6 вер 2024
- In this video I look at 10 exclusive and very worthy games for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer.
Video Links:
10 Amazing TI99/4A Facts: • 10 Amazing Texas Instr...
TI99/4A Games Compilation: • Over 50 Texas Instrume...
The Great Computers of All-Time: • The 20 Greatest Home C...
Amazing Exclusives Playlist:
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#Gameplay #TI99 #RetroGaming
Tunnels of Doom was our go-to, and still gets played to this day. Probably one of the most fondly remembered TI exclusive by a lot of members of the community.
This.
It was probably the game that had the most life for me on the 99 after the system was abandoned by TI, thanks to Asgard Software selling mission packs and the TOD Editor toolkit to make your own adventures.
It tends to get overlooked by people who weren’t playing it at the time because they either don’t have the disk / cassettes for the two included missions or are unaware of the Asgard published missions.
Whenever I think of a dungeon crawler to this day, TOD is the benchmark I compare it to because it was a favorite for so long.
Took the words out of my mouth (fingers?). Tunnels of Doom was a masterpiece.
This was my first home computer and as much as I loved it the situation for owneres in the UK meant that getting your hands on software became a nightmare. I was lucky enough to have an aunt who lived in New York and she sent me over a few titles that were not available in the UK until a bit later. I'm now in the position of having just about every cartridge ever released on the machine bar 1 or 2 of the very rare 3rd party titles. The machine was never fully exploited back in the day with the exception of a handful of titles. Homebrew development has now shown just what a capable system it is. Great conversions of SabreWulf, Knightlore, Jet Set Willy, Pyjamarama, Scramble, Dragon's Lair and many others have breathed new life into the old tin wonder.
Wow, impressive! I never even knew about it back in the day, now having a lot of fun discovering it.
How the hell did they pull off FMV on a Ti-99/4a??? I just watched a UA-cam video of gameplay from this and it's incredible! I thought I played and owned (In the past) all the very best games that the Ti-99/4a had to offer. I finally sold off all my stuff around 2015 and if I just held onto it Dragon Lair came out 2 year LATER?!? Very nice, thanks for that bit of information. Congratz you have one of the finest Ti99/4A collection of software! I always thought the Ti99 had a Sexy Delorean futuristic styling and now it has the software to backup it's good looks.
Back in the day when I had the Ti-99/4a the best game on the console IMO was Q-Bert. Q-Bert was always one my very favorite classic games I was first introduced to when I was only 6 years old in 1984 when I received the table top portable arcades from Parker Bro's. I put hundreds of hours into it as the more you get into it the more in depth the strategy and gameplay gets. I took that Mini Arcade of Q-Bert everywhere I went. I was always on the hunt for what is the best home port of this incredible game. I had the Colecovision version which was good but Q-Bert just looked so WRONG without any eyes. When I finally played the Ti99/4a version I was instantly in love! Easily the best home port of the great game. The graphics are so clean Q-Bert has big beautiful eyes and it became my go to Q-Bert until I finally sold my Ti99/4a in 2015 along with all my other retro games.
My hands still hurt from using those joysticks.
So happy I grew up with this being my very first video game system. All my friends who had Atari 2600, Colecovision, Atari 800, and even Commodore 64 would come to my house to play video games.
Alpiner- Absolute classic. I laughed so hard getting farted on by the skunk, kicking the bear in the bum and falling down the mountain.
Parsec- Somewhere in between Defender and Scramble but far better than either of those games. The overheating was overwhelming and the fuel stations and triangular ships were brutal. This was like a legit arcade game at the time.
Moon Mine- One of my friends had this one. Stunning visuals and fantastic sound effects. This was arcade quality and deserves recognition.
Tombstone City- No thanks. Better than Early Learning Fun or actually not.
Tunnels of Doom is definitely the best TI99 game not a 3rd party title.
Hopper and Slimeoids also worth mentioning. TI Invaders to a much lesser extent.
I had arcade ports of Donkey Kong, Burgertime, and Congo Bongo.
Imagic made some of the best 3rd party titles. My Aunt had Super Demon Attack which was fantastic. I had Fathom but most important Microsurgeon which was the most graphically impressive game and one of the most original and stunning games ever made for the system. Other ports of Microsurgeon were terrible compared to the great TI99 version. A game that blew my mind away and still impressive this day.
Love it that Moon Mine made the list! That was my first project when I went to work at the TI Home Computer Division. Great times. John.
Really good game, you did a fine job!
This was a unique game. Weird and quirky and very arcade looking quality. I liked the sound and humor also. It was unconventional before Sega made unconventional cool. You should be proud. I played a few of your games and they are definitely favorites and some of the best on the system.
Lot of very fun and unique games on this system. Very underrated.
It struck me back in the day, and in this retrospective, just how many TI games had white backgrounds at a time where black was the background colour of most arcade titles.
Would be fun to see a a compilation of exclusive modern homebrew titles, (DSAPSC's 'Mad Marvin', 'NeverLander' and 'Tex Turbo & the Big Bug Battles' are three of my favourite games on the system and are but a small sampling of completely original games (such as the games of Rasmus, most notably his "Bouncy" series of bouncing ball games, which include 'Bouncy' 'Skyway' & 'Obstacle Course'.
The TI's quirks made it the slowest computer with a 16 bit processor ever to hit the market, but it also presented challenges that modern coders have embraced (a passion that has given us TI versions of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros (level 1-1 - 1-4) and Sega's Alexx Kidd, looking as good as their source games do on their original systems.)
Sad that emulation does not do the speech synth justice. The clarity of TI speech always blew away my Atari and Commodore using friends (as surely as they would criticize all the white background games). Unfortunately TI speech just hasn't been duplicated using the current selection of emulation options. BUT!! Emulation does let us play Tunnels of Doom (notably missing from your 'exclusives' complation) in turbo mode, which I would have killed for in 1982.
(ET at Sea was the better ET game. It was a rip off of "Where in the World is Carmen Santiago", but I found that less embarassing than a bad Frogger clone.)
I was just thinking the same thing -- Pole Position starts off with a light-red background at the title screen. I recall when I'd play or make TI BASIC / Extended BASIC games, that simply changing the background at the start was an indication of something special -- since most BASIC games left the background as whatever the default was. Color was such a big deal back then. Parsec using colors to indicate which level you were on helped communicate even to onlookers that you were somewhere special in the game.
I remember learning how to program on it after my parents got one.
These days, I program professionally.
The sound of the big red alien spawning in The Attack always freaked me out as a kid (and after watching this video, still freaks me out)
I absolutely loved my TI-99. My ultimate favorite game was Hunt the Wumpus!! I sure wish I kept the system and all the games I had. Pretty sure it was 1982!,
The tendency of white backgrounds being used in these games is jarring, makes me think they all take place in a snow field. Space Bandits looks pretty amazing though, I love the gameplay concept.
oh no you didn't show that commercial just now, lol
Chisholm Trail and Tombstone City had a really great WTF factor. There were a number of vaguely similar games on other systems, but none with the WTF theming.
The TI-99/4a is certainly well loved by its fanatical fans, but the system was just not good for programming, and that's what essentially doomed it. The architecture only gives the CPU a puny amount of RAM, so programs have to be in video RAM (very slow for the CPU to access). This choice made sense for what TI wanted to do - they wanted to sell cartridges, so programs would be in cartridge ROM rather than loaded into RAM.
And TI's basic idea wasn't obviously a bad idea - the cartridge based Atari VCS was selling more than all home computers combined, so why not a cartridge based home computer?
Well, as things would shake out over the next few years, no cartridge based home computer would succeed, while various tape and floppy based home computers would thrive. The successes would even include the MSX, which had the same video chip as the TI-99/4a, but a more flexible balanced architecture.
If I remember right, the 99/4a was the only home computer that could calculate SQR(9)*3 correctly. Being a proper 16-bit machine and all...
I'm missing something. Your comment was interesting enough to prompt me to open up some emulators. Using the Basic installed on a C64, TRS-80 (model 1) and an MSX (hb201p), "PRINT SQR(9)*3" always results in "9". Should I expect something else?
Thank you. Hearing the audio brings it all flooding back to me. Our TI99/4a is the garage somewhere packed away. Munchman, Centipede and Hunt the Wumpus were the games I most played. Oh and Parsec. And Burger Time (:
My Aunt and Uncle had a 4A and I got to play a lot of it.
The TI was odd in retrospect for the lack of ports. Tombstone City is the "Most TI-99/4A Game" to me. It's the game that is most tied to the system. I remember playing more of Alpiner or Parsec, but Tombstone City is "the game".
Of the other really TI-99/4A games, I would put two games you mentioned, the Head-On Clone "Car Wars" and Pac-Man Clone "Muchman", and "Hunt the Wumpus", which technically is a port of an old text BASIC game, but isn't like any other version of the game.
There was a pretty good port of Q-Bert for this computer and the Tennis game was good also.
Ti-99 is what I consider my first home videogame experience. A lot of my friends had it for some reason which I assume is a result of when they were on clearance! I liked Parsec but I was pretty bad at it. 😁 Ti Invaders and Hang Man was also ones I remember playing.
Ok, the Bill Cosby and ET parts were funny. Good video.
Tunnels of Doom and Protector II (Atarisoft) are good 'uns too. Burgertime is a really solid port, let down by the fact that when you make any sound in the game the very loud music resets and starts playing from the beginning. Munch Man is a good Pac-Man clone, and Demon Attack is extremely different from its other ports, in a good way.
I've looked at BurgerTime and Super Demon Attack on the channel before, totally agree with your comments.
Was thinking Tunnels of Doom myself. Spent some time playing it at a friends house.
Yes Tunnels of Doom is the dungeon crawler. I've been trying to remember. That was the only game like it, that I had found in 1982. Seemed to have influenced many future franchises.
I had several home micros and the 99/4A was my favorite to use, even though technically it was far behind my CoCo3- the hardware was just very well built and a pleasure to use.
I used to love Slymoids - I think that that was a TI original too.
Yes, I nearly included that in the video!
Tunnels of Doom, man.
One of my earliest memories (I was like 3) is of Parsec on the TI-99/4a. I remember thinking that when I'm older I'll be good at this game. No, it's still brutal. 😅
ET frogger and space bandits...new to me!
The rest Ive had for years!
Great job Sir!
A Great video again!! I love the TI, it was one of our computers at home in the 80s, and I really enjoyed extended BASIC on it, as the in built one was very slow and limited.
I don't know why, but seeing this version of ET being just a clone of Frogger made me almost fall from my chair! Sorry! 😄
Bigfoot was my favorite on the system
Never seen this computer b4, games do look cool.
ROFL! Texas Instruments managed to make an E.T.-themed frogger and somehow got away with it; still beats the Atari E.T. megaflop which made the whole videogame industry collapse!
Atari's E.T. wasn't that bad and it certainly wasn't responsible for the crash, that was a much wider issue.
@@TheLairdsLair come on man! thousands of cartridges buried in a desert (of shame) should be enough to be considered the worst 8 bit game in history.Even the developer recognized the game sucked big time; he put up the excuse of "with only 6 months before xmas it was an impossible mission to deliver a good game about the megahit movie"; then do it, but once it was out it drove the whole industry down.
I had Moon sweeper on the 2600. Nice little game.
One important feature of parsec was the refueling system
Is the TI-99/4a honestly arguably a “16-bit computer?” I had one, as a kid-and I have one, now-but, as much as I might love it, if it were 16-bit, then it were the most powerfully-underutilized 16-bit, mass scale computer, ever made. My NES, Atari 800, and even my 8-bit Colecovision had *much* better graphics and sound capabilities than my TI-99 had (or has) _ever_ been used to achieve - which is all not to mention the C64...
I can’t imagine *anything* that could be run on a TI-99 that could look and/or sound anywhere close to Donkey Kong Country (or even most SNES launch titles... ). I understand there are different components, and that they often had different bit rates, particularly in the in the ‘80s, but to call the TI-99 a “16-bit computer,” in a video about its *games,* handcuffs it more than it makes one seem fair/decent, to a machine that’s slightly better than a “Speccy.”*
*No, I don’t court drama... Why do you ask?
It has a 16-bit CPU, so yeah its 16-bit. Not that bits mean a lot, I mean compare something like the Sinclair ZX81 (TS-1000) to the MSX2 - both are 8-bit and both have a Z80 processor. Yet the ZX81 has black & white graphics, no sound and the screen flashes on every refresh. The MSX2 looks like a 16-bit computer. The hardware around the CPU is everything.
The TI's VDP is 16 bit but it's main processor shoehorned with an 8-bit data bus. That's why if you can code for the VDP chip by itself (say a fractal demo) it will process very fast while using the main processor it's much slower.
The Colecovision uses the same video chip as the TI...
Sadly, the speech output in this video is pretty garbled... seems like the speech gets output on the wrong model of speech synth (the TMS5220) which is halfway, but not fully compatible with the one used on the TI-99. I think the speech quality is much better in the MAME emulator. It's funny that you included Tombstone City, Chisholm Trail and The Attack which are pretty similar to one another. I think those games, among others had a unique "style" which gave the TI-99/4A its identity, and other games also were somewhat adapted to that style, making Munch Man and TI Invaders "TI-fied" versions of Pac-Man and Space Invaders, respectively. And did you notice Moon Mine has in part the same messages as Parsec? Also, I'm not sure if I'd really call the MB titles third-party because MB played a heavy role in designing the TI-99 (especially its graphics chip) in the first place, and I think it was initially planned as a MB game console, but that plan fell through, so TI kept the plans and put the system out as a home computer instead. Other companies played with or against TI's policy to various degrees, which actually was TI being the sole supplier of cartridge software. MB of course played pretty friendly and only developed things, leaving distribution to TI, as later did Sega, Imagic and Data East. Parker Brothers went a bit more aggressive... they did use GROM's, but only for graphics, and their cartridges had a different shape than TI's own. The most extreme ones were Atarisoft who tried to keep independent from TI as far as they could, having their unique cartridge shape and, to my knowledge, only used CPU ROMs.
I read something about the connection to MB and a proposed console but the mention was very brief with no detail and despite a huge amount of Goggle-fu I couldn't come up with anything more than that. Shame as I'd like to find out more and it would make a great video too.
There were a lot of interesting exclusives, but Hunt the Wumpus was a good one
Hunt the Wumpus wasn't an exclusive, it appeared on pretty much every 8-bit computer in some shape or form, but yes it does have a lot of interesting games.
@@TheLairdsLair Huh.... didn't know that - thanks for letting me know :)
@@TheLairdsLair Huh.... didn't know that - thanks for letting me know :)
It has some interesting history - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus
@@TheLairdsLair Nice - thanks! The only complaint with TI's version is the palette - what were they thinking using a white background?? XD
Anyway nice video and indeed channel - i've got it added to the list of retro channels :)
I've never heard the speech synthesizer emulated well; the real hardware sounds much better.
I was going to say the same thing. The speech in this video sounds like ass compared to a real voice module.
Having spent the time to get the speech synthesizer emulation for my emulator up to par, I can say that it's much harder to get right than simply getting the basic sound chip working. Getting the speech chip output right is the first step, properly filtering and up-sampling the 8 KHz signal to match your computers audio sampling rate is next. It sounds like the emulator used in the video doesn't have that final filtering/sampling step working as well as it could.
I haven't used any other emulators in quite a while, but I'm sure there are others out there that sound as good or better than mine. Keep looking!
Hahaha, Bill Cosby
The mountain game looks kinda cool.
Blasto! Great music on that one and pretty fun too!
Great game, it was an arcade port though.
@@TheLairdsLair No way! I just looked it up. I had no clue that existed, and I see why. The TI version blows the arcade out of the water in every way. (Except for the explosion sound lol)
Nice video. Why does the voice modulation sound so bad though? It sounds much better on my TI99.
Because it's using emulation.
How could you do a video about TI-99 exclusive games and NOT include Munchman?!
Because it's just a Pac-Man clone, so not all that interesting!
@@TheLairdsLair It's noteworthy for being one of the best, and also having unusual aspects such as the small sprites (which had the effect of making the map essentially larger) and lots of different well animated enemies. The pace was also really fast compared to other Pac-Man games, right up until arguably Pac-Man CE DX.
For whatever reasons, there just wasn't anything else like it on any other systems.
@@IsaacKuo Your analysis of Munch Man is spot on. (However, given it's a clone, it doesn't fit "exclusive" territory, especially since they had to change the munching into leaving a chain to avoid possible lawsuits.) But it was an incredible game. Animations were great. Good point re: the small sprites. The fractional pixel speeds of the Munch Man and the Hoonos -- which increased with level advanced, and also when you ate the energizer -- must have been interesting to program, and really took this game to the next level. I used to use the Shift-838 hack to play level 60 just to see if I could even control the Munch Man at those insane speeds. I learned quickly to abandon the joysticks and use the keyboard.
I think you need to re evaluate your interpretation of the word "amazing" lol. I am all for retro games including 2600 era, but nothing here is "AMAZING"!
The other comments say different!
@@TheLairdsLair Oh yes, ANYONE'S opinion is always valid, always. Just sharing mine. Retro games are my favourite and they always will be, but these days I only go as far back as the C64 when I use emulation (which I do every day). I haven't played a 2600 or even 5200 game in years. Only two 7800 games I like and I can barely tolerate them cause of the terrible sound. C64 I love to this day even though graphically it was maybe less powerful than a 7800. It was the smoothness of so many games and the sound. The sound of the games in this vid is too annoying for me to play any of these in any real way. Hope that makes sense.
The same reason I don't play many Amiga games to this day vs Snes and Mega Drive is that the Amiga ports were almost always terrible and lazy. I actually play C64 versions over Amiga versions in most cases.
When talking about a real retro game that was on a lot of systems, Bruce Lee is what I would call "amazing", and that's as simple as gaming gets. Just an example of personal opinion and something I tolerate even on Atari 8 bit also hehe.
What about the game CALLED “Amazing”? Is that not a TI Exclusive?
Using a Bill Cosby advert?
He was famous for advertising the TI99, so yeah.
Doesn't mean I'm a fan or support his actions.