You know that is really one of the things you just don't get with digital distribution today, that neat feeling of anticipation when you got something new. Looking at the package, reading the manual, and wondering how it would actually run it what it would actually do.
Wing War looks quite good. I would have loved to have played it as a kid. I grew up with the TI-99 and had a bunch of games. I think Parsec alone singlehandedly got me into video games. The Donkey Kong port was really good as well. And Microsurgeon was quite trippy.
I had both an Atari 800XL and TI-99/4A back in the day (the TI bought at the end of 1981, the Atari in 1985). At the end of 1985 I got Imagic 1-2-3 for the Atari. As you guess it had three games on one disk, Laser Gates, Quick Step and Wing War. I never realized Wing War was supposed to been released on the TI but it never happened. At least I had the Atari to play Wing War. I did own Imagic titles that did make it on TI like Fathom and Super Demon Attack.
Nice. This is the first time I've heard directly of someone buying Imagic 1-2-3 back in the day. Wing War is kind of a lost gem on *all* of the systems it got released on. Given even on 2600 and Colecovision (where it got a cart release) it's rare.
Ooh, Lobster Bay has a Donkey Kong style sexy butt flip at the top of ladders! Noteworthy, considering the TI (and other Atarisoft) ports of Donkey Kong lacked that sexy butt flip.
Loved this video! So much TI stuff that I never saw before! Thank you so much. Years ago, I purchased a NIB MBX unit, still have it. Might have to make a vid on it sometime. I never even opened it to make sure it's all there.
I always found it sad that SNK's Fantasy and Lasso never got released (I really like both of them) whereas the gawdawful Munchmobile made it to store shelves. I knew the arcade game, so imagine my disappointment when I plugged it in at home. I expected more from SNK (even if the 4A was no NeoGeo). I return to the DataEast unreleased games often, but Rasmus has spoiled us with super-smooth scrolling, so as much as I try, I just can't play them. I LOVE Starship Pegasus... I have a similar game on cassette from Moonbeam Software (Moonvasion??) but it is not as polished (and being BASIC, not as fast). Thank you btw, I never noticd that you can control the shots. How many lives you have saved is yet to be seen. Thank you for introducing Lobster Bay in your Funware review. It is now among my favourite games. You were a little hard on Video Vegas (which at least looks nice for an 80's slot machine game) , but you were spot-on with Lobster Bay. Also, if it were not for you, none of us would know what the heck is going on in Wing War. But agreed, Tutankham is a brilliant port as good on the TI as any system of the era. Of course we never got to play "it in the era". It generated such excitement upon it's late, late, late release that it felt like the release of a modern game franchise. I missed Pitfall on cartridge, I was not going to miss this one too! Excellent compilation as always sir.
Some interesting ones here especially Wing War from Imagic my favorite 3rd party dev for Ti99 4/a games. Looks incredible. Fantasy looks like a direct arcade port. If the game isn’t difficult already it must be a nightmare on Ti joysticks. I didn’t realize it was unreleased. Tutankham looks really good. Such an overlooked classic that was great for its time and still fun to play. Someone created a homebrew for the C64 that looks like this one. Robotron like Black Widow or Smash TV is fun with twinstick controllers. It’s just not the same playing it any other way.
@@arcadeshopper Do we even know that there was any actual programming done on Joust, or was this only a marketing plan? And the same for Robotron... shown on advertising, but as far as I've ever seen, never actually coded? These are the only two "totally AWOL" games I can think of off the top of my head... which I think had a legitimate chance of being produced, anyway. (The Zaxxon version was never going to hit the machine back then, though I'm excited as heck to see a version of that finally coming close to release now!)
@@carybrown851 I know there was on Robotron because I sell a cart with it on it.. Also available on atariage.. Joust we have no evidence other than some hearsay that a prototype existed. The person with it refuses to share anything with the community.
You make me want to break out my TI hardware. Got the PEB, the monitor, etc... Trouble is, especially the monitor, caps and such need to be replaced. You have a really great channel.
Some nice games there, I really liked the look of Lobster Bay. I used to play Astro Fighter in the arcade back in the day, always wondered why it never got a port. Turns out it did, almost. As for Cave Creatures, it reminded me of Omega Race, I think because your ship bounces off the wall. Great video, thanks!
Wow, I would have loved Robotron 2084. I do have the MBX. I think I bought all the games. Except for the educational titles, if there were any. I was still buying TI carts until 1990 and amassed 90 carts. In 1990 I also purchased my first PC. Ironically, that PC is LONG gone, but I still have my beloved 99 items in the closet... and in a box, and under a storage desk...
In the early 80s it was more common than otherwise for arcade game ports to be based not on the arcade original but rather one of the preexisting home ports, and Tutankham here was clearly one of those, as its "traveling around the level" mini-tune is a perfect recreation of the unfortunately inaccurate ColecoVision version. Cannonball Blitz may be little-known but it was one of the few dozen games I grew up with on the old Apple IIe. I actually saw Fantasy once in some kind of shop while on vacation, and, as a kid, found it to be just a little abstract. A weird game hidden in the corner of a shop where it would never really see any customers.
The TI-99 Tutankham prototype's similarity to the Colecovision version isn't a matter of its imitating a prior version. Parker Bros developed both, and since the systems share sound and graphics chips in common, they mostly used the same assets (as they did for Popeye and Frogger). Imagic is another company which did this, with their TI-99 and CV versions of Fathom, Moonsweeper, and Wing War mostly using the same assets for both versions.
I've always been a huge TI fan (since it was my first home computer), and I haven't heard of most of these prototypes. I kind of heard of some, like Starship Pegasus and Fantasy, but my mind was blown to find out Mission X and Robotron 2084 were done but didn't make it to market. I was wondering if you'd consider doing an episode about the public domain scene that sprang up after TI left the market. I used to get piles of disks from Tigercub Software that I'd order out of the back of Micropendium Magazine. Until the owner passed away, unfortunately. It's how I found out about foreign releases that were clones of European computer games like Oh Mummy. And I found out about prototypes like Arcturus.
Nice to hear from someone who's played the Lasso arcade version. I found it rather enjoyable too. Not groundbreaking or anything. But pleasant, and well made.
Can you say more about how you learned so few MBX systems were made? I know it came out very late in the game, and I believe that I bought mine from the Triton Products Company catalog in the fall of 1985, and at the time I didn't realize how rare this was. I knew it was a must-have purchase as soon as I saw it, and I was extremely impressed with it. I didn't do anything special to purchase mine other than be a regular patron of whatever I could afford from the latest Triton catalog. I always assumed there were a lot fewer MBXs than there were most other TI hardware, but hearing that there were fewer than 1000 (or some anecdotal accounts are apparently saying only 300) ever manufactured, seems like a surprisingly low number. I still have mine in good working order, along with all my other hardware, but I had no idea that its rarity was on that scale. I'm curious how you arrived at that number, or where you can point me for further research?
There are a few sources from which to surmise the number produced. Home Computer Compendium, Feb 1984: "So what happened to the several thousand MBX systems that were produced? According to a TI spokesman, the units were gobbled up by TI and Milton Bradley employees." Home Computer Digest vol 1, issue 1: "Milton Bradley, who had produced the MBX for only two weeks prior to the TI pull-out announcement, will not market the device, but has distributed the surplus through internal employee sales at both companies." Micropendium, Apr 1984, "Only a limited number of the units were produced were produced prior to TI's pullout from the home computer market. Production ceased at that point and the units that were produced were quickly gobbled up by TI employees." As for specific vendors, Triton continued to advertise the unit through Fall 1986, so they certainly had some supply of their own. And Unisource listed 200 in stock in early 1984, so they had a fair number too. And Computer Corner in Detroit had MBX products on display in 1984, so evidently they had at least some.
@@PixelPedant Thanks so much for these excellent citations! As always, your research is impeccable. I really appreciate being able to know more about my MBX. These various examples paint a fuller picture which is in line with my sense of the supply at the time. I don't know what the output rate of manufacture was for those brief weeks, whether that means that would have been able to make a couple hundred or a few thousand, but the trend seems to be that it was made for only a short time, and then the small, fixed supply was divided up several ways, with there being a few pockets where it was still available from a finite stock until it was eventually depleted. I wasn't tracking any suppliers other than Triton, but its availability through Fall 1986 confirms my sense that a few stayed around for sale after I bought mine, which led me to think it was rare, but not extraordinary, to own one. I suppose that being a pre-Internet time made it possible for the unit to last a bit longer, if there was a high demand in certain areas but people didn't know about those sellers, combined with sellers not being able to reach beyond their marketing areas or mailing lists. In today's world, if there were 1000 or 2000 units of something that an entire niche community strongly desired, the idea it could stay on the proverbial shelves for a couple years would be seemingly impossible. Thanks for bringing me back to the 1980s when such things were possible. It's always a great trip!
There are disk versions of many of these kicking around here and there. In all of those cases, the disk versions are designed to load to (and run from) the 32K, and thus require it. There's also an unfortunate tendency for these older disk versions to be less complete or bug-free, as anybody distributing this kind of thing in the past decade has distributed for flashcart, making disk versions in many cases older dumps which may or may not be reliable or complete.
One of the things about Starship Pegasus. I would love to actually play that with an MBX. However, I don't think you can get a disk dump to work with the MBX. Has anyone been able to get a copy of it to boot with the MBX plugged in? Not sure what would be needed, but I would think if it was burnt onto a cart or maybe one of those multi-carts that might work? I ask, since I have to wonder if it used the 360 degree knob on the joystick for anything or played differently using the MBX sticks. I know SuperFly was different with the MBX plugged in since you could rotate the fly 360 degrees using the knob, allowing you to fire at a different angle than the direction you were flying in.
Yup. As I say in the video, the MBX hardware does nothing in the dump we have, as far as I can tell. I tried it, and the game itself started and played fine with the MBX connected and turned on. But the game didn't respond to any MBX input.
@@PixelPedant I think one of the things not mentioned was that there is up to 4 players that can play. Would that mean each one could control one side of the ship? If so, how would that have worked? Wonder if some type of special 4-way controller was in the works for the MBX?
@@PixelPedantI have the MBX, and I also have MBX carts on disk - the disk versions do not work with the MBX attached (voice comes out of the speech synthesizer instead). That would lead me to believe that a physical copy would need to be mounted in the cartridge port in order for the MBX unit to function. I wonder if it would work with FinalGrom? I can’t help but feel that some type of special chip along side the ROM itself would make Starship Pegasus work on a real MBX console! Would you know if the MBX carts themselves had some type of special chip? The only other thing I could think of is the initialization sequence wherein the cart takes over after the title screen and communicates with the MBX unit. It would be awesome to see this game running on a real MBX console! And as Bryan Roppolo mentioned, some type of special functionality with the joystick and/or the keypad!
@@bryan.nicalek The MBX carts are indeed a unique design, and some of them utilise onboard RAM in a fashion which is not (so far) supported by the FinalGROM. I'm Hiding, Terry Turtle's Adventure, and Championship Baseball don't work at all, via FinalGROM.
You know that is really one of the things you just don't get with digital distribution today, that neat feeling of anticipation when you got something new. Looking at the package, reading the manual, and wondering how it would actually run it what it would actually do.
Wing War looks quite good. I would have loved to have played it as a kid. I grew up with the TI-99 and had a bunch of games. I think Parsec alone singlehandedly got me into video games. The Donkey Kong port was really good as well. And Microsurgeon was quite trippy.
I had both an Atari 800XL and TI-99/4A back in the day (the TI bought at the end of 1981, the Atari in 1985). At the end of 1985 I got Imagic 1-2-3 for the Atari. As you guess it had three games on one disk, Laser Gates, Quick Step and Wing War. I never realized Wing War was supposed to been released on the TI but it never happened. At least I had the Atari to play Wing War. I did own Imagic titles that did make it on TI like Fathom and Super Demon Attack.
Nice. This is the first time I've heard directly of someone buying Imagic 1-2-3 back in the day. Wing War is kind of a lost gem on *all* of the systems it got released on. Given even on 2600 and Colecovision (where it got a cart release) it's rare.
Ooh, Lobster Bay has a Donkey Kong style sexy butt flip at the top of ladders! Noteworthy, considering the TI (and other Atarisoft) ports of Donkey Kong lacked that sexy butt flip.
Loved this video! So much TI stuff that I never saw before! Thank you so much. Years ago, I purchased a NIB MBX unit, still have it. Might have to make a vid on it sometime. I never even opened it to make sure it's all there.
I always found it sad that SNK's Fantasy and Lasso never got released (I really like both of them) whereas the gawdawful Munchmobile made it to store shelves. I knew the arcade game, so imagine my disappointment when I plugged it in at home. I expected more from SNK (even if the 4A was no NeoGeo).
I return to the DataEast unreleased games often, but Rasmus has spoiled us with super-smooth scrolling, so as much as I try, I just can't play them.
I LOVE Starship Pegasus... I have a similar game on cassette from Moonbeam Software (Moonvasion??) but it is not as polished (and being BASIC, not as fast). Thank you btw, I never noticd that you can control the shots. How many lives you have saved is yet to be seen.
Thank you for introducing Lobster Bay in your Funware review. It is now among my favourite games. You were a little hard on Video Vegas (which at least looks nice for an 80's slot machine game) , but you were spot-on with Lobster Bay. Also, if it were not for you, none of us would know what the heck is going on in Wing War.
But agreed, Tutankham is a brilliant port as good on the TI as any system of the era. Of course we never got to play "it in the era". It generated such excitement upon it's late, late, late release that it felt like the release of a modern game franchise. I missed Pitfall on cartridge, I was not going to miss this one too!
Excellent compilation as always sir.
Some interesting ones here especially Wing War from Imagic my favorite 3rd party dev for Ti99 4/a games. Looks incredible.
Fantasy looks like a direct arcade port. If the game isn’t difficult already it must be a nightmare on Ti joysticks. I didn’t realize it was unreleased.
Tutankham looks really good. Such an overlooked classic that was great for its time and still fun to play. Someone created a homebrew for the C64 that looks like this one.
Robotron like Black Widow or Smash TV is fun with twinstick controllers. It’s just not the same playing it any other way.
Wing War sure calls up attention, its lander/joust style was never really pushed further and I love finding those gems.
Wing war is such a well realized design. They really captured a fantasy world look and feel.
Thank you Pixelpedant for another great video!🤩
Excellent video! Would like to see more of these games in the future!
So would we.. some unreleased titles are still MIA like Joust
@@arcadeshopper Do we even know that there was any actual programming done on Joust, or was this only a marketing plan? And the same for Robotron... shown on advertising, but as far as I've ever seen, never actually coded?
These are the only two "totally AWOL" games I can think of off the top of my head... which I think had a legitimate chance of being produced, anyway. (The Zaxxon version was never going to hit the machine back then, though I'm excited as heck to see a version of that finally coming close to release now!)
@@carybrown851 I know there was on Robotron because I sell a cart with it on it.. Also available on atariage.. Joust we have no evidence other than some hearsay that a prototype existed. The person with it refuses to share anything with the community.
Aaron plays the copy robotron we have in this video in fact
Amazing video. Thanks again for a wonderful trip down memory lane!
That was my computer when I was a kid. I loved playing Munch-man and Burger Time on the TI-99!
Lobster Bay is a nice mixture between Keystone Kapers and Sea Hunt; the character is very well animated.
You make me want to break out my TI hardware. Got the PEB, the monitor, etc... Trouble is, especially the monitor, caps and such need to be replaced. You have a really great channel.
Thanks. Go for it, and break out that TI-99!
My compliments on another excellent video.
Great job. Can’t wait for your next subject. Bonjour de France (Cannes)
Some nice games there, I really liked the look of Lobster Bay. I used to play Astro Fighter in the arcade back in the day, always wondered why it never got a port. Turns out it did, almost. As for Cave Creatures, it reminded me of Omega Race, I think because your ship bounces off the wall. Great video, thanks!
Excellent review. my TI is up and running:)
Nice! Glad to hear it.
Wow, I would have loved Robotron 2084. I do have the MBX. I think I bought all the games. Except for the educational titles, if there were any. I was still buying TI carts until 1990 and amassed 90 carts. In 1990 I also purchased my first PC. Ironically, that PC is LONG gone, but I still have my beloved 99 items in the closet... and in a box, and under a storage desk...
Sure wish I had some of these games. They would have been amazing at the time.
In the early 80s it was more common than otherwise for arcade game ports to be based not on the arcade original but rather one of the preexisting home ports, and Tutankham here was clearly one of those, as its "traveling around the level" mini-tune is a perfect recreation of the unfortunately inaccurate ColecoVision version. Cannonball Blitz may be little-known but it was one of the few dozen games I grew up with on the old Apple IIe. I actually saw Fantasy once in some kind of shop while on vacation, and, as a kid, found it to be just a little abstract. A weird game hidden in the corner of a shop where it would never really see any customers.
The TI-99 Tutankham prototype's similarity to the Colecovision version isn't a matter of its imitating a prior version. Parker Bros developed both, and since the systems share sound and graphics chips in common, they mostly used the same assets (as they did for Popeye and Frogger). Imagic is another company which did this, with their TI-99 and CV versions of Fathom, Moonsweeper, and Wing War mostly using the same assets for both versions.
I've always been a huge TI fan (since it was my first home computer), and I haven't heard of most of these prototypes. I kind of heard of some, like Starship Pegasus and Fantasy, but my mind was blown to find out Mission X and Robotron 2084 were done but didn't make it to market.
I was wondering if you'd consider doing an episode about the public domain scene that sprang up after TI left the market. I used to get piles of disks from Tigercub Software that I'd order out of the back of Micropendium Magazine. Until the owner passed away, unfortunately. It's how I found out about foreign releases that were clones of European computer games like Oh Mummy. And I found out about prototypes like Arcturus.
The "Tigercub", and Jim Peterson as the man behind the name, could make an interesting subject, indeed. Something to consider, for sure.
I first played Lasso just a couple months ago, I found the arcade to be pretty fun. I was excited to see a port of it here.
Nice to hear from someone who's played the Lasso arcade version. I found it rather enjoyable too. Not groundbreaking or anything. But pleasant, and well made.
That’s nuts!
By the way, i received the game tape. Incroyable! Merci
Can you say more about how you learned so few MBX systems were made? I know it came out very late in the game, and I believe that I bought mine from the Triton Products Company catalog in the fall of 1985, and at the time I didn't realize how rare this was. I knew it was a must-have purchase as soon as I saw it, and I was extremely impressed with it. I didn't do anything special to purchase mine other than be a regular patron of whatever I could afford from the latest Triton catalog. I always assumed there were a lot fewer MBXs than there were most other TI hardware, but hearing that there were fewer than 1000 (or some anecdotal accounts are apparently saying only 300) ever manufactured, seems like a surprisingly low number. I still have mine in good working order, along with all my other hardware, but I had no idea that its rarity was on that scale. I'm curious how you arrived at that number, or where you can point me for further research?
There are a few sources from which to surmise the number produced. Home Computer Compendium, Feb 1984: "So what happened to the several thousand MBX systems that were produced? According to a TI spokesman, the units were gobbled up by TI and Milton Bradley employees." Home Computer Digest vol 1, issue 1: "Milton Bradley, who had produced the MBX for only two weeks prior to the TI pull-out announcement, will not market the device, but has distributed the surplus through internal employee sales at both companies." Micropendium, Apr 1984, "Only a limited number of the units were produced were produced prior to TI's pullout from the home computer market. Production ceased at that point and the units that were produced were quickly gobbled up by TI employees." As for specific vendors, Triton continued to advertise the unit through Fall 1986, so they certainly had some supply of their own. And Unisource listed 200 in stock in early 1984, so they had a fair number too. And Computer Corner in Detroit had MBX products on display in 1984, so evidently they had at least some.
@@PixelPedant Thanks so much for these excellent citations! As always, your research is impeccable. I really appreciate being able to know more about my MBX. These various examples paint a fuller picture which is in line with my sense of the supply at the time. I don't know what the output rate of manufacture was for those brief weeks, whether that means that would have been able to make a couple hundred or a few thousand, but the trend seems to be that it was made for only a short time, and then the small, fixed supply was divided up several ways, with there being a few pockets where it was still available from a finite stock until it was eventually depleted. I wasn't tracking any suppliers other than Triton, but its availability through Fall 1986 confirms my sense that a few stayed around for sale after I bought mine, which led me to think it was rare, but not extraordinary, to own one. I suppose that being a pre-Internet time made it possible for the unit to last a bit longer, if there was a high demand in certain areas but people didn't know about those sellers, combined with sellers not being able to reach beyond their marketing areas or mailing lists. In today's world, if there were 1000 or 2000 units of something that an entire niche community strongly desired, the idea it could stay on the proverbial shelves for a couple years would be seemingly impossible. Thanks for bringing me back to the 1980s when such things were possible. It's always a great trip!
Thank you for the great video! Would these prototype games run off disk with TI Extended BASIC?
There are disk versions of many of these kicking around here and there. In all of those cases, the disk versions are designed to load to (and run from) the 32K, and thus require it. There's also an unfortunate tendency for these older disk versions to be less complete or bug-free, as anybody distributing this kind of thing in the past decade has distributed for flashcart, making disk versions in many cases older dumps which may or may not be reliable or complete.
One of the things about Starship Pegasus. I would love to actually play that with an MBX. However, I don't think you can get a disk dump to work with the MBX. Has anyone been able to get a copy of it to boot with the MBX plugged in? Not sure what would be needed, but I would think if it was burnt onto a cart or maybe one of those multi-carts that might work? I ask, since I have to wonder if it used the 360 degree knob on the joystick for anything or played differently using the MBX sticks. I know SuperFly was different with the MBX plugged in since you could rotate the fly 360 degrees using the knob, allowing you to fire at a different angle than the direction you were flying in.
Yup. As I say in the video, the MBX hardware does nothing in the dump we have, as far as I can tell. I tried it, and the game itself started and played fine with the MBX connected and turned on. But the game didn't respond to any MBX input.
@@PixelPedant I think one of the things not mentioned was that there is up to 4 players that can play. Would that mean each one could control one side of the ship? If so, how would that have worked? Wonder if some type of special 4-way controller was in the works for the MBX?
@@PixelPedantI have the MBX, and I also have MBX carts on disk - the disk versions do not work with the MBX attached (voice comes out of the speech synthesizer instead). That would lead me to believe that a physical copy would need to be mounted in the cartridge port in order for the MBX unit to function. I wonder if it would work with FinalGrom? I can’t help but feel that some type of special chip along side the ROM itself would make Starship Pegasus work on a real MBX console! Would you know if the MBX carts themselves had some type of special chip? The only other thing I could think of is the initialization sequence wherein the cart takes over after the title screen and communicates with the MBX unit. It would be awesome to see this game running on a real MBX console! And as Bryan Roppolo mentioned, some type of special functionality with the joystick and/or the keypad!
@@bryan.nicalek The MBX carts are indeed a unique design, and some of them utilise onboard RAM in a fashion which is not (so far) supported by the FinalGROM. I'm Hiding, Terry Turtle's Adventure, and Championship Baseball don't work at all, via FinalGROM.
TI 99
Does anybody want two TI 99s and a bunch of games and other program cartridges?