OMG, Tunnels of Doom! That was a $69 game in 1983; my dad got if for me when I was 12. This computer had a 16 bit processor, and was the best selling computer in the US in 1982. Commodore ran it out of business with aggressive pricing; but they sold 2-3 million of them. Try Parsec, its better than defender. Thanks for showing me the opening screen to tunnels of doom, I played it for 12hrs straight Christmas 1983.
"Here's some information that was included with the TI 99/4A!" (opens booklet) Texas Instruments Abandons Home Computer Production Well, at least they let you know right away where you stand.
I'm so excited to watch this. I've been scouring flea markets and goodwills for years hoping to come across a retro computer and today I finally found one! Got a TI-99/4a for $27 at a local shop and while I had to buy cables separately, I'm excited to dive into everything I can learn about my new computer!
Me too. Asked Mom to buy one for me, was told to get a job. Got a paper route, bought TI994A, learned BASIC. Mine used to overheat on the "coffee warmer" and lock up. That is when I would go outside and play like a normal kid.
My first computer followed by c64 and amiga. And at the time it was a great intro for me to computing and basic programming. I have many fond memories of parsec, tunnels of doom and scott adams return to pirate isle games.
Great video, you would be surprised to realise that people are still writing and selling new game cartridges for this machine. Your TV video output has come out quite nicely, when I record my TI output directly from the TV with my mobile I get a lot of Moiré patterns.
my parents bought one of these computers specifically because my younger brother was blind and it had a speech synthesizer so he could use it. a few of the games were fun, the text based games were pretty challenging, remember having to load them on the computer using a cassette tape player....excellent review
My little brother worked for TI back in 82 and bought one at the TI employees store, he added an extra 16 K of memory, if I remember correctly it was a whole separate box, the speech processor and a little color monitor that was maybe 7 or 8 inches and 5 1/2 inch floppy drive. He had a bunch of games and I remember Parsec being the best one. He let me play with it and I wrote a BASIC (basic) card file database program for it, but it would have taken a lot less time and been much easier to have just gone out and bought a little Rolodex and hand written the names and address in it. Back in the early 80's, cordless phones, TV's with IR remotes, VCR's and Sony Walkmans were high tech. Maybe 1 in a 1000 homes had a computer.
oh, boy! I definitely remember having one of these back home! along with a decent collection of carts, but I don't recall the cassettes. Go figure, I was young! Thanks for bringing back some forgotten memories!
I'm sad. I spent much of my childhood typing in those programs in those TI and Home Computer magazines. In fact, I only got Home Computer magazines IF they had TI programs in them.
Great memories about this computer! I was one of the first 10 "crazy" people that began to study computer programming in my home town in Argentina in 1986. I learned BASIC in the school, there were 4 TI 99/4A with memory expansion units. I was 15 years old, since then I continue studying at the university, and working in information technology until today. Thank you for sharing.
loved this system. i got two of these when i was about 4-5 years old, with like 50 cartridges, at them at garage sales in the late 80s for practically nothing. played some of the games well into the 90s.
Man, I remember spending a ton of time programming the lamest 'choose your own adventure' games on this thing. It had the voice modulator box stuck on the right side, then the RAM expansion box daisy chained to that. It also had an unbelievably massive 5.25 floppy drive, the tape recorder add-on which was just one of those standard top loader portable recorders from the 80's, and the modem, which was the type you had to physically put the handset on, and the phone had to be the type with both a round earpiece and mic. Save games consisted of looking at the counter on the tape recorder, and fast forwarding / rewinding to that spot. I need to look into picking one of these back up.
My neighbour, Baptist ministers son, has a TI99/4A. Seemed a decent machine, stood up well, we enjoyed playing games on it when we weren't playing on my BBC micro.
The TI994a's main downfall was Texas Instrument's insistence on keeping everything proprietary and not publishing system specs so that third party developers could develop for it...until late in its cycle. Price was also a problem (too dang high!), especially once you bought the peripherals and other attachments for it. Not a bad computer, but the company was a little short-sighted in that respect. [edit: the built-in BASIC was actually not too shabby. Was it built in or on a cart? I can't remember]
Both. The built in basic called TI Basic was quite limited (1 instruction per line, no ELSE, IF could only do GOTO, no sprites, only scrolling print, only 1 dimension arrays, etc..). Any serious programming would at least require the acquisition of the TI Extended Basic module, which was much much better and lifted most of the limitations.
My recollection from the time it came out (I was a high school nerd then) was that every program (even games) on it had to be interpreted, which made it much slower than developing in assembly/machine code.
I can remember the TI-99-4A going for $299, and then $150. Then $99, and then cleared out for $49.99. Even with Bill Cosby shilling these things. It was pretty awesome though, for what you got. 2 joysticks, a solid state computer, and an RF connector, for channels 3 and 4. You had to send in for the speech synthesizer, as well as various extension bases. You could use a number of cassette recorders for the cassette data, so the use of the TI branded cassette drive was optional. I enjoyed the TI-99-4A. Esp. when I got all of the cartridges for a song, when they cleared them out. It was a tough little thing. And yes, I enjoyed the heck out of it.
ours was the beige one from '83. we had the speech module and i fondly recall learning BASIC programming on it, as well as hours upon hours playing Donkey Kong, Alpiner, and my personal favorite, Parsec.
We were poor and just starting a family when I came across a brand new one in a yard sale. Had never even been opened and the lady said she bought it for her Son to take to college but he was not interested in it so I offered 25.00 and she accepted... Best day ever...
We had a bunch of these at my high school. When we got some money to buy some PC's, we had a project where we wrote an American geography game for the middle schoolers as they were to inherit the old hardware. I freaked the teacher out at one point by POKEing random values into the Space character so it looked like the machine was having a stroke. :D
I had one of these as a kid. Dad bought it from Asda who were selling them off cheap as nobody wanted them. I used to sit for hours typing in games programs and then when you ran the game there was the tension of whether or not you would get that low pitched boop and some error message like STRING NUMBER MISTMATCH IN 590 or BAD VALUE IN 780. Then you had to look and see what you had mistyped which often wasn't the actual line the machine was telling you but some other line that that line depended on!
A friend had one and really had it do fancy things. Kind of a genius. It does not have a clock (if I'm right), so he had an invisible sprite doing the timing. We worked on flight simulators (I had a Sharp MZ-731 with horrible graphics). He had horse racing and a small labyrint filled with spiders, gunners and sometimes an E. coli. The bacterium was a helper. You had to move "Varme-Joe" through the labyrint, in fact a precursor to Mario. And we ran prime number listings and other very weird things. Some time you should look on the Sharp MZ-computers. The MZ-731 is still the best documented computer that I have ever looked at.
Ah, a walk down memory lane with a look at my first computer. I don't remember the keyboard being like that. I do remember it being hard to get software for though. I learnt basic on it though which was good.
Hooray TI 99/4a! My very, very, very VERY first computer! A whole lot of years later, I ran across one all beat to crap, but still working, at a thrift. Made my day playing Parsec again after 30+ years.
Brings back sooooo many memories for me this review. I used to go into the Texas Instruments store in the Arndale Centre in Manchester and play on this TI99/4A after school. There were 2 really great guys in there that let me use it for like months. 1 was a tall Scottish chap, I can't remember the other chap (the boss's name). I also remember playing football and those joysticks used to bend like bananas! It wasn't quite the FIFA standard of today, but fun all the same. The chess program was really quite good for the day (Especially the backup feature!) Then there was some guy that coded and wrote things like Othello. Lines and lines of code full of Call HCHAR commands. I also remember typing up pages of code only to then hit Shift Q, which does a system reset, DOH! Great memories and thanks for the video.
I almost got a TI, but ended up with a C64 instead. I'm actually relieved that I did because I don't think I would have been happy with the TI. I'd only had the Atari 2600 and computers always seemed like something I'd never own. Then one Christmas, Toys 'R' Us advertised the TI99/4a for $50, so I started asking my parents for one. I didn't understand that they were so cheap because it was discontinued. After a trip to a local toy store, I switched from asking for the TI to asking for the C64. Never mind the fact that it was MUCH more expensive. So that's what I got for Christmas, along with a Datasette. I'd read that most people used cassettes with the TI, so I didn't know that nobody in the US used them with the C64. The disk drive didn't come until the following year. Anyway, looking at the TI now, while it's not horrible, it seems more complicated than the C64. Most C64 peripherals just plugged in, but with the TI, you needed an expansion box, special cartridges to make some games work, etc. Playing with an emulator/simulator, I still can't get most of the PD TI software to work. I load the BASIC files according to the instructions I found on the web, but when I try to run them, they all give me errors. Cartridge games work fine, but anything on disk/tape is a crapshoot.
I remember Parco Elrpectrics. Continued to supply genuine Texas Instruments software and hardware along with third party software until approx 1989.. They went bankrupt on purpose and reopened as Database but didn’t last long. I contacted Texas Instruments and they told me that they pulled out of the home computer market in 1983. The software was only 8- bit event though the cpu was 16- bit. It has 16k of ram. They were pretty rare and not much software available compared with Spectrum and Commodore computers so they died a death. I still have mine in the loft with the Atari Donkey Kong cartridge and about 10 adventure games amongst a few others. Found an old Walkman to loas the games up last time I used it many years ago.
The Colecovision / ADAM used the same video chips as the TI 99/4A. I have a bunch of cartridge software for it, like Microsoft Multiplan. A local technical college had a computer lab with them and the huge expansion boxes. I have Atarisoft Donkey Kong and it's quite good. You really needed TI Extended BASIC to do anything substantial.
Ti99/4a was my first computer,and with extended basic it was quite usable and the speech synth was great. A sexy looking machine with black keys and brushed aluminum case. It was really a exercise in how NOT to design a computer with its 16bit cpu, crippled 8 bit ram, multiplexed 8 bit bus to the PEB..The PEB was a monstrosity of a dongle too! It needed a full keyboard w/cursor keys badly and i wont even get into the GROM chips LOL. I still have mine and with FinalGrom99 it rocks. I will always have a soft spot for it,but the C64 mopped the floor with it :)
I actually got one of these for free too, back in 89' with Burger Time, Alpiner, Car Wars, & Space Invaders I think, but didn't even know it had joysticks, I got mine without em' but used the keyboard to control the games, I got used to it and was happy camper with it, ended up selling it though and bought Super C for the NES with the money.
This was my second computer after the ZX81 and the most important one of my life. Not only did I learn to program on it (the Extended Basic was cool with its high-level sprite controls), but everyone else at school had either a C64 or a Spectrum so I felt very "special" (and had no one to trade games with, which is why I learned to program, which eventually landed me in the computer business). I should really emphasize that if you didn't have the Extended Basic, you had nothing. With it, you could do things in Basic that'd make your C64 friends cry (because they had to poke around so much to accomplish anything).
You need to get yourself the expansion box, and stick a couple disk drives and more RAM into it ;) Also, find some assembly language games online. ... The TI really was a QUITE capable system, but nothing that was officially put out for it really leveraged its capabilities. It's capable of a DEAD ON version of Pac-Man, Frogger, Donkey Kong, etc ........ also, it's audio capabilities are quite incredible too. A friend back in the 80s gave me a disk with the song "Axel F" on it, and it sounded simply INCREDIBLE on the TI. I had no idea it was capable of such wonders.
You got what's marked as the first ever produced for free? Nice. "Not that sort of aids." I had two of these in the 80s (one which wouldn't run BASIC). They had better sound than anything I'd had before and I played transcriptions of sheet music and generated extra carriers to widen my presence on the citizens band.
I remember “Parco Electrics” . It was a goldmine as very few shops sold software for the TI99. I contacted them regarding availability of software and was told that they had pulled out of the home computer market in 1983. Managed to get many titles from Parco. The best I ever got was Real Atari “Donkey Kong”. I spent hours on it. My favourite genre was the “Scott Adams” style text “Adventure Games”. Btw “FCTN P” is Quotation Marks.
Be careful buying these on ebay. If you see one without any cables, specifically the PSU, stay away because everything was proprietary and not standard. The PSU was a sort of dual AC psu with that odd-looking connector, while the video connector only worked with that massive modulator. And there were 2 modulators. The older metal one in this video was the better one because it was so easy to composite mod, while the plastic one required a a much more complicated mod. The joystick connector was not standard, even though it was 9-pin, it required a adapter to use standard 9-pin joysticks. You can get modern storage for this machine with a TI99-4A Flashrom99 device found on ebay, saves paying huge prices for the original carts. Great machine when you get it working via composite.
you can use a standard c64 video cable on the ti99/4a,you dont have to use the horrible modulator. commodore 1902,1902a,1702,1084,1080 make great monitors also.
+a4000t Huh, no kidding. I knew they were the same type of plug, but I never got a chance to see if they were compatible-by the time we had a TV with RCA jacks, the computer had stopped working. I suppose it works the other way around, as well, if you had a Commodore 64 whose RF unit quit working and you wanted to hook it up to a vintage TV set via the antenna wires.
We had one of this in my school (I live in Argentina) and we never get to do anything but write programs because we didn't have games or cartridges, it was really boring. This is the first time I see a game for the TI99
Hunt the Wumpus was probably one of the best early graphical ones. Parsec and Alpiner were not horrible either. But the Zork series text games (on floppy) were the most fun IMHO.
Nice overview of the computer. It's the model I started with back in the 1980s. Thankfully I wasn't stuck with the TI joysticks, though. I had a Wico Command Control adapter that allowed the much better Atari and Commodore joysticks to be used instead. I spent lots of time copying BASIC programs from magazines and saving them to cassettes that sometimes decided they didn't want to load properly, too.
Got this computer as a high school graduation gift from my aunt back in 1983. At the time,I thought it was neat,but as the years passed it soon got very dated.
Very first home computer I ever had as a kid, learned to programme on it, really liked my TI. Went from this to Spectrum couple years later, an Atari ST good bit further down the line, then PCs after that. Fancy laptop today is nice, but still have warm nostalgia for this and the Speccy (and the BBC B we used in school then)
So...i just got mine today. My dad once worked for the Consumer Electronics Group in Lubbock when this guy was being developed. He got to bring one home at some point...it must've been '84 or so. As it turns out he still had it in the attic. Hopefully I'll get to hook it up this week and go through some of the games.
My younger brother had a TI99/4A but he didn't have the extended Basic cartridge. Without it TI Basic had a Peek command but no Poke command, so you could read the memory but not alter it. If I remember correctly the cartridge also had more RAM on it, without which you couldn't write many lines of code before it ran out of memory. The couple of times I tried using it I was playing with the user defined graphics, but by the time I'd defined a few new character shapes there was no memory left to have a program that used them. I'd have tried using machine code but with no Poke command that wasn't possible.
Mains plugs weren’t hard to come by but nothing came i with a plug connected so you tended to remove them from things like bedside lamps or anything else you could do without. You could pick them up fairly cheap from cheap Poundland type shops.
Hey guys. I have found a great Emulator for this and it's portable. the Retro Arcade can play Open Dingux and Burgertime has 2 versions much like MSX. I got mine from Funny Playing but I think Ali-Express has them still. Two little controllers as well. Just open the Dge file and play a game off a rom file you set up. Have fun. Great system.
I have one of these, and am surprised by how clean the image you got is. Mine has some serious problems with the image being distorted (basically, you can't get a straight line vertically on the screen). It did spend quite a few years in my parents' attic, so that could have something to do with it.
I created my first game ever using TI-BASIC. It also was my last game ever by the way. Got tired of typing hundreds of lines for the simplest thing to happen. Now, any kid can use a block animation tool and create stunning graphics in few minutes. I ended up becoming a boring corporate software developer :-(
Thing is, the 68000 CPU in the Megadrive (and many other machines) also takes 4 cycles to perform a memory read or write (and IIRC so does the Z80; it's only the 6502 that can hit memory faster, amongst 1980s processors). Although it does do it at a genuine 16 bits wide (not sure if the TI's CPU has that luxury) and generally at a rather higher clock rate...
My dad bought one of these-the beige one-from an auction in the late '90s in a box with a bunch of other electronic doodads (including whatever the real reason he bid on it was; he had no interest in the computer) and several games still in-box. Most of them were pretty dull, but I loved playing _Hunt the Wumpus_ on it. Then it quit working one day and I tossed it, only to find one of the black-and-aluminum ones in its original box... somewhere. That eventually quit working too, but it's still sitting around waiting for me to learn how to fix it.
OMG, Tunnels of Doom! That was a $69 game in 1983; my dad got if for me when I was 12. This computer had a 16 bit processor, and was the best selling computer in the US in 1982. Commodore ran it out of business with aggressive pricing; but they sold 2-3 million of them. Try Parsec, its better than defender. Thanks for showing me the opening screen to tunnels of doom, I played it for 12hrs straight Christmas 1983.
I played "Parsec" on the TI....A lot! It Really was an "upgrade" compared to "Defender" (I do like both though!)
My first computer was a TI-99/4A. It was a lot of fun to use. I had a lot of accessories for it plus the expansion box.
"Here's some information that was included with the TI 99/4A!"
(opens booklet)
Texas Instruments Abandons Home Computer Production
Well, at least they let you know right away where you stand.
I'm so excited to watch this. I've been scouring flea markets and goodwills for years hoping to come across a retro computer and today I finally found one! Got a TI-99/4a for $27 at a local shop and while I had to buy cables separately, I'm excited to dive into everything I can learn about my new computer!
my first computer
Mine too. Learned how to program in BASIC on this machine.
Me too. Asked Mom to buy one for me, was told to get a job. Got a paper route, bought TI994A, learned BASIC. Mine used to overheat on the "coffee warmer" and lock up. That is when I would go outside and play like a normal kid.
My dad's first computer too. Brings back childhood memories for me.
Same.
My first computer. Stored programs and data on cassette tape. Wired a serial printer to it. I’m 72 years old. Retired from 45 years in I T
My first computer followed by c64 and amiga. And at the time it was a great intro for me to computing and basic programming. I have many fond memories of parsec, tunnels of doom and scott adams return to pirate isle games.
Oh wow, I had one of these in the early 80's and loved it. My first computer!
Great video, you would be surprised to realise that people are still writing and selling new game cartridges for this machine. Your TV video output has come out quite nicely, when I record my TI output directly from the TV with my mobile I get a lot of Moiré patterns.
my parents bought one of these computers specifically because my younger brother was blind and it had a speech synthesizer so he could use it. a few of the games were fun, the text based games were pretty challenging, remember having to load them on the computer using a cassette tape player....excellent review
My little brother worked for TI back in 82 and bought one at the TI employees store, he added an extra 16 K of memory, if I remember correctly it was a whole separate box, the speech processor and a little color monitor that was maybe 7 or 8 inches and 5 1/2 inch floppy drive. He had a bunch of games and I remember Parsec being the best one. He let me play with it and I wrote a BASIC (basic) card file database program for it, but it would have taken a lot less time and been much easier to have just gone out and bought a little Rolodex and hand written the names and address in it. Back in the early 80's, cordless phones, TV's with IR remotes, VCR's and Sony Walkmans were high tech. Maybe 1 in a 1000 homes had a computer.
We had a lab of these in my elementary school when I was growing up.
The First PC i've ever played with, and i loved it.
oh, boy! I definitely remember having one of these back home! along with a decent collection of carts, but I don't recall the cassettes. Go figure, I was young! Thanks for bringing back some forgotten memories!
I'm sad. I spent much of my childhood typing in those programs in those TI and Home Computer magazines. In fact, I only got Home Computer magazines IF they had TI programs in them.
Remember the magazine "Compute"!? :)
@@tomy.1846 I used to subscribe to it :)
It's always great to watch a computer review from someone who has no idea what the computer is, what it's functions are, or how it works. Great video.
My first computer. After seeing the price I’m wondering how my parents afforded it.
It was sometimes sold for as little as 40 dollars after TI dropped support
Great memories about this computer! I was one of the first 10 "crazy" people that began to study computer programming in my home town in Argentina in 1986. I learned BASIC in the school, there were 4 TI 99/4A with memory expansion units. I was 15 years old, since then I continue studying at the university, and working in information technology until today. Thank you for sharing.
TI99/4A Extended BASIC is just lovely. I did a credits sequence in BASIC on it, with music and sprites and it is a joy.
loved this system. i got two of these when i was about 4-5 years old, with like 50 cartridges, at them at garage sales in the late 80s for practically nothing. played some of the games well into the 90s.
Seen and loved that "mighty calculator" :D
Still have mine 36 years later, I've given it to my two-year old. It's a perfect first computer for kids - like a Nintendo and a PC rolled into one.
Man, I remember spending a ton of time programming the lamest 'choose your own adventure' games on this thing. It had the voice modulator box stuck on the right side, then the RAM expansion box daisy chained to that. It also had an unbelievably massive 5.25 floppy drive, the tape recorder add-on which was just one of those standard top loader portable recorders from the 80's, and the modem, which was the type you had to physically put the handset on, and the phone had to be the type with both a round earpiece and mic.
Save games consisted of looking at the counter on the tape recorder, and fast forwarding / rewinding to that spot. I need to look into picking one of these back up.
My neighbour, Baptist ministers son, has a TI99/4A. Seemed a decent machine, stood up well, we enjoyed playing games on it when we weren't playing on my BBC micro.
The TI994a's main downfall was Texas Instrument's insistence on keeping everything proprietary and not publishing system specs so that third party developers could develop for it...until late in its cycle. Price was also a problem (too dang high!), especially once you bought the peripherals and other attachments for it. Not a bad computer, but the company was a little short-sighted in that respect.
[edit: the built-in BASIC was actually not too shabby. Was it built in or on a cart? I can't remember]
BASIC was built-in as you can see in the video at 5:44. You are given the option to either enter BASIC or load from the cartridge.
Both. The built in basic called TI Basic was quite limited (1 instruction per line, no ELSE, IF could only do GOTO, no sprites, only scrolling print, only 1 dimension arrays, etc..). Any serious programming would at least require the acquisition of the TI Extended Basic module, which was much much better and lifted most of the limitations.
TI Basic was built in - it was quite nice and even had some built in machine language routines to make it faster.
@@galier2 Any *serious* programming would have been done in TMS9900 assembly, never basic.
My recollection from the time it came out (I was a high school nerd then) was that every program (even games) on it had to be interpreted, which made it much slower than developing in assembly/machine code.
I can remember the TI-99-4A going for $299, and then $150. Then $99, and then cleared out for $49.99. Even with Bill Cosby shilling these things.
It was pretty awesome though, for what you got. 2 joysticks, a solid state computer, and an RF connector, for channels 3 and 4.
You had to send in for the speech synthesizer, as well as various extension bases. You could use a number of cassette recorders for the cassette data, so the use of the TI branded cassette drive was optional.
I enjoyed the TI-99-4A. Esp. when I got all of the cartridges for a song, when they cleared them out. It was a tough little thing.
And yes, I enjoyed the heck out of it.
Got one for Christmas when I was a kid brings back a lot of memories
ours was the beige one from '83. we had the speech module and i fondly recall learning BASIC programming on it, as well as hours upon hours playing Donkey Kong, Alpiner, and my personal favorite, Parsec.
My first computer!! I thought if I had this, I could dial into my schools computer and change my grades, like in War Games.
I started my computer career on one of these in 1983.. Thanks for sharing.
We were poor and just starting a family when I came across a brand new one in a yard sale. Had never even been opened and the lady said she bought it for her Son to take to college but he was not interested in it so I offered 25.00 and she accepted... Best day ever...
That version of defender looks pretty awesome!
This thing is gorgeous!
We had a bunch of these at my high school. When we got some money to buy some PC's, we had a project where we wrote an American geography game for the middle schoolers as they were to inherit the old hardware. I freaked the teacher out at one point by POKEing random values into the Space character so it looked like the machine was having a stroke. :D
haha ... CALL CHAR(32,"181384234572342") ... :)
I had one of these as a kid. Dad bought it from Asda who were selling them off cheap as nobody wanted them. I used to sit for hours typing in games programs and then when you ran the game there was the tension of whether or not you would get that low pitched boop and some error message like STRING NUMBER MISTMATCH IN 590 or BAD VALUE IN 780. Then you had to look and see what you had mistyped which often wasn't the actual line the machine was telling you but some other line that that line depended on!
Ah my childhood. The hours I spent on this.
Great video! Such great memories. My Grandfather was a plant site manager for TI and we got one of the first ones. Munchman master here!
A friend had one and really had it do fancy things. Kind of a genius. It does not have a clock (if I'm right), so he had an invisible sprite doing the timing. We worked on flight simulators (I had a Sharp MZ-731 with horrible graphics). He had horse racing and a small labyrint filled with spiders, gunners and sometimes an E. coli. The bacterium was a helper. You had to move "Varme-Joe" through the labyrint, in fact a precursor to Mario. And we ran prime number listings and other very weird things.
Some time you should look on the Sharp MZ-computers. The MZ-731 is still the best documented computer that I have ever looked at.
Most underrated channel ever
Arrow keys? WASD? ESDX master race!
Thanks to the educational games on this computer, I was doing 1st-grade-level reading, spelling, & math when I ENTERED KINDERGARTEN in 1984!
My first computer - I felt like an engineer at DEC with this sitting on my desk.
Ah, a walk down memory lane with a look at my first computer. I don't remember the keyboard being like that. I do remember it being hard to get software for though. I learnt basic on it though which was good.
For a while I had Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" from the TI-99/4(A) version of "Yahtzee" (recorded from an actual 99/4A) as my ringtone!
Hooray TI 99/4a! My very, very, very VERY first computer! A whole lot of years later, I ran across one all beat to crap, but still working, at a thrift. Made my day playing Parsec again after 30+ years.
3:28
Always found it interesting that british say, "Texas," as the short way of saying, _Texas Instruments_ , while americans say, "T - I."
Brings back sooooo many memories for me this review. I used to go into the Texas Instruments store in the Arndale Centre in Manchester and play on this TI99/4A after school. There were 2 really great guys in there that let me use it for like months. 1 was a tall Scottish chap, I can't remember the other chap (the boss's name). I also remember playing football and those joysticks used to bend like bananas! It wasn't quite the FIFA standard of today, but fun all the same. The chess program was really quite good for the day (Especially the backup feature!) Then there was some guy that coded and wrote things like Othello. Lines and lines of code full of Call HCHAR commands. I also remember typing up pages of code only to then hit Shift Q, which does a system reset, DOH! Great memories and thanks for the video.
I almost got a TI, but ended up with a C64 instead. I'm actually relieved that I did because I don't think I would have been happy with the TI.
I'd only had the Atari 2600 and computers always seemed like something I'd never own. Then one Christmas, Toys 'R' Us advertised the TI99/4a for $50, so I started asking my parents for one. I didn't understand that they were so cheap because it was discontinued. After a trip to a local toy store, I switched from asking for the TI to asking for the C64. Never mind the fact that it was MUCH more expensive. So that's what I got for Christmas, along with a Datasette. I'd read that most people used cassettes with the TI, so I didn't know that nobody in the US used them with the C64. The disk drive didn't come until the following year.
Anyway, looking at the TI now, while it's not horrible, it seems more complicated than the C64. Most C64 peripherals just plugged in, but with the TI, you needed an expansion box, special cartridges to make some games work, etc. Playing with an emulator/simulator, I still can't get most of the PD TI software to work. I load the BASIC files according to the instructions I found on the web, but when I try to run them, they all give me errors. Cartridge games work fine, but anything on disk/tape is a crapshoot.
Make sure the alpha lock key is off as it does mess up the joystick operation
+keanebgONE I'm pretty sure it was. May have overlooked it though
I remember Parco Elrpectrics. Continued to supply genuine Texas Instruments software and hardware along with third party software until approx 1989.. They went bankrupt on purpose and reopened as Database but didn’t last long. I contacted Texas Instruments and they told me that they pulled out of the home computer market in 1983. The software was only 8- bit event though the cpu was 16- bit. It has 16k of ram. They were pretty rare and not much software available compared with Spectrum and Commodore computers so they died a death. I still have mine in the loft with the Atari Donkey Kong cartridge and about 10 adventure games amongst a few others. Found an old Walkman to loas the games up last time I used it many years ago.
The Colecovision / ADAM used the same video chips as the TI 99/4A. I have a bunch of cartridge software for it, like Microsoft Multiplan. A local technical college had a computer lab with them and the huge expansion boxes. I have Atarisoft Donkey Kong and it's quite good. You really needed TI Extended BASIC to do anything substantial.
Lovely video. I adore my 99/4A, it’s a fun machine. Nice to see I’m not the only Brit who enjoys it.
It's kind of sad seeing these old computers that will be forgotten in the future.
Ti99/4a was my first computer,and with extended basic it was quite usable and the speech synth was great. A sexy looking machine with black keys and brushed aluminum case. It was really a exercise in how NOT to design a computer with its 16bit cpu, crippled 8 bit ram, multiplexed 8 bit bus to the PEB..The PEB was a monstrosity of a dongle too! It needed a full keyboard w/cursor keys badly and i wont even get into the GROM chips LOL. I still have mine and with FinalGrom99 it rocks. I will always have a soft spot for it,but the C64 mopped the floor with it :)
You'd think TI should have been a big player in the personal computer market. Strange quirk of history.
I actually got one of these for free too, back in 89' with Burger Time, Alpiner, Car Wars, & Space Invaders I think, but didn't even know it had joysticks, I got mine without em' but used the keyboard to control the games, I got used to it and was happy camper with it, ended up selling it though and bought Super C for the NES with the money.
I went on a cultural student exchange to France in 1984. I had a C=64. My "host brother" had a TI99/4A. A chasm opened twixt us.
This was my second computer after the ZX81 and the most important one of my life. Not only did I learn to program on it (the Extended Basic was cool with its high-level sprite controls), but everyone else at school had either a C64 or a Spectrum so I felt very "special" (and had no one to trade games with, which is why I learned to program, which eventually landed me in the computer business). I should really emphasize that if you didn't have the Extended Basic, you had nothing. With it, you could do things in Basic that'd make your C64 friends cry (because they had to poke around so much to accomplish anything).
What's the ambient music in the background? As in not intentionally part of the video. Great Hammond playing !!
It actually sold millions, but not 10 millions like the C64.
You need to get yourself the expansion box, and stick a couple disk drives and more RAM into it ;)
Also, find some assembly language games online. ... The TI really was a QUITE capable system, but nothing that was officially put out for it really leveraged its capabilities. It's capable of a DEAD ON version of Pac-Man, Frogger, Donkey Kong, etc ........ also, it's audio capabilities are quite incredible too. A friend back in the 80s gave me a disk with the song "Axel F" on it, and it sounded simply INCREDIBLE on the TI. I had no idea it was capable of such wonders.
Quotation marks is and P.
You got what's marked as the first ever produced for free? Nice. "Not that sort of aids." I had two of these in the 80s (one which wouldn't run BASIC). They had better sound than anything I'd had before and I played transcriptions of sheet music and generated extra carriers to widen my presence on the citizens band.
I remember “Parco Electrics” . It was a goldmine as very few shops sold software for the TI99. I contacted them regarding availability of software and was told that they had pulled out of the home computer market in 1983. Managed to get many titles from Parco. The best I ever got was Real Atari “Donkey Kong”. I spent hours on it. My favourite genre was the “Scott Adams” style text “Adventure Games”. Btw “FCTN P” is Quotation Marks.
This was my first "proper" computer. So many memories. Then again, I'm a yank so it was far easier to get running.
Be careful buying these on ebay. If you see one without any cables, specifically the PSU, stay away because everything was proprietary and not standard. The PSU was a sort of dual AC psu with that odd-looking connector, while the video connector only worked with that massive modulator. And there were 2 modulators. The older metal one in this video was the better one because it was so easy to composite mod, while the plastic one required a a much more complicated mod. The joystick connector was not standard, even though it was 9-pin, it required a adapter to use standard 9-pin joysticks.
You can get modern storage for this machine with a TI99-4A Flashrom99 device found on ebay, saves paying huge prices for the original carts. Great machine when you get it working via composite.
you can use a standard c64 video cable on the ti99/4a,you dont have to use the horrible modulator. commodore 1902,1902a,1702,1084,1080 make great monitors also.
a4000t only ntsc models , NOT pal.
sorry, i am in the usa ;)
We Americans had it TOO easy with our power. Never having to re-wire plugs and all that.
+a4000t Huh, no kidding. I knew they were the same type of plug, but I never got a chance to see if they were compatible-by the time we had a TV with RCA jacks, the computer had stopped working. I suppose it works the other way around, as well, if you had a Commodore 64 whose RF unit quit working and you wanted to hook it up to a vintage TV set via the antenna wires.
We had one of this in my school (I live in Argentina) and we never get to do anything but write programs because we didn't have games or cartridges, it was really boring. This is the first time I see a game for the TI99
+Lord Alfajor There were quite a few games, some were pretty good graphically. Others were trash as you'd expect.
Hunt the Wumpus was probably one of the best early graphical ones. Parsec and Alpiner were not horrible either. But the Zork series text games (on floppy) were the most fun IMHO.
Nice overview of the computer. It's the model I started with back in the 1980s. Thankfully I wasn't stuck with the TI joysticks, though. I had a Wico Command Control adapter that allowed the much better Atari and Commodore joysticks to be used instead. I spent lots of time copying BASIC programs from magazines and saving them to cassettes that sometimes decided they didn't want to load properly, too.
+xargos Those joysticks... man, it's like playing with fudge.
Loved the text adventure games. Needed the Adventure cart and each game on cassette.
The TI99 had a really interesting drawing tablet peripheral.
Used to have a version of Defender on a 5.25" floppy for my Tandy 1000 that ran on CGA graphics
That was my "home computer" of choice, and I had lots of fun with it!
Got this computer as a high school graduation gift from my aunt back in 1983. At the time,I thought it was neat,but as the years passed it soon got very dated.
Very first home computer I ever had as a kid, learned to programme on it, really liked my TI. Went from this to Spectrum couple years later, an Atari ST good bit further down the line, then PCs after that. Fancy laptop today is nice, but still have warm nostalgia for this and the Speccy (and the BBC B we used in school then)
So...i just got mine today. My dad once worked for the Consumer Electronics Group in Lubbock when this guy was being developed. He got to bring one home at some point...it must've been '84 or so. As it turns out he still had it in the attic. Hopefully I'll get to hook it up this week and go through some of the games.
I remember playing these at kiosks at Sears and Eatons. Ahhh the memories of these weird machines.
This was my first computer back in '82 and I was thirteen years old. Cut my programming teeth on it using Extended Basic/TI Basic.
TI-99/4a "Extended BASIC" was the shit!, When I got a "real" IBM-PC I was disappointed in the LESSER capability of IBM-PC "BASICA"!
My younger brother had a TI99/4A but he didn't have the extended Basic cartridge. Without it TI Basic had a Peek command but no Poke command, so you could read the memory but not alter it. If I remember correctly the cartridge also had more RAM on it, without which you couldn't write many lines of code before it ran out of memory. The couple of times I tried using it I was playing with the user defined graphics, but by the time I'd defined a few new character shapes there was no memory left to have a program that used them. I'd have tried using machine code but with no Poke command that wasn't possible.
@@MickeyTTT The Extended Basic allowed access to any additional RAM you had, such as in a PE box, It Also had access to the Speech synthesizer.
Hunt the wampus is a classic
Getting one of these free today after work. 20 games, joysticks, and speach systhisis
Beautiful machine. I hope you give it a good home and it gets some steady use.
I just found one of these in the trash, works and everything
I was in high school when this came out. All I remember is that it was definitely the coolest looking PC at the time, but also the slowest.
Play alpiner on this with a speech modulator, its hysterical
HEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLP!
**DID YOU MEAN TO DO THAT?**
Favourite game!!!!!
Watch for that skunk!
While not as powerful as my CoCo 3, my ti994a was a lot more pleasant to actually use. It was a really nice computer.
When it first came to the UK it came with a specialist Monitor and no modulator and cost around £1,000 if I remember correctly
My first computer, the one I learned BASIC on before graduating to a string of Commodores. It was extremely satisfying to me at age 10.
Mains plugs weren’t hard to come by but nothing came i with a plug connected so you tended to remove them from things like bedside lamps or anything else you could do without. You could pick them up fairly cheap from cheap Poundland type shops.
So a cassette game that has to be started from a cartridge, that's unique.
There is a Break key. No need to turn off to end loops.
If this is the one with that game "Hunt the Wumpus", then this was my first home computer.
Hey guys. I have found a great Emulator for this and it's portable. the Retro Arcade can play Open Dingux and Burgertime has 2 versions much like MSX. I got mine from Funny Playing but I think Ali-Express has them still. Two little controllers as well. Just open the Dge file and play a game off a rom file you set up. Have fun. Great system.
I have one of these, and am surprised by how clean the image you got is. Mine has some serious problems with the image being distorted (basically, you can't get a straight line vertically on the screen). It did spend quite a few years in my parents' attic, so that could have something to do with it.
I created my first game ever using TI-BASIC. It also was my last game ever by the way. Got tired of typing hundreds of lines for the simplest thing to happen. Now, any kid can use a block animation tool and create stunning graphics in few minutes. I ended up becoming a boring corporate software developer :-(
I had one, only game we had was Defender.
Nice looking machine. Is the top of the machine made of metal or just silver plastic?
+Shundi12 It's aluminium! Nice and shiny
Thing is, the 68000 CPU in the Megadrive (and many other machines) also takes 4 cycles to perform a memory read or write (and IIRC so does the Z80; it's only the 6502 that can hit memory faster, amongst 1980s processors). Although it does do it at a genuine 16 bits wide (not sure if the TI's CPU has that luxury) and generally at a rather higher clock rate...
NN, you have covered practically every retro system in existence, APART FROM THE ATARI 400/800/XL/XE! Why are you adverse to covering this series?
For the fame.
I am considering getting my 7 year old a Texas Instruments TI-994A for basic and educational cartridges. Any opinion on a better choice for her?
My dad bought one of these-the beige one-from an auction in the late '90s in a box with a bunch of other electronic doodads (including whatever the real reason he bid on it was; he had no interest in the computer) and several games still in-box. Most of them were pretty dull, but I loved playing _Hunt the Wumpus_ on it. Then it quit working one day and I tossed it, only to find one of the black-and-aluminum ones in its original box... somewhere. That eventually quit working too, but it's still sitting around waiting for me to learn how to fix it.
That’s the computer we had when I was a kid. We had a pacman clone, hangman, and a shooter game on cartridges.
I love the side compartment. It's cool.
Our family had one of these when I was a kid! Black and amber monochrome monitor though :(