TI99/4A -- what kind of cool stuff can I do with it?

[aclbandit]

Well, aside from the games, I know that when I was a kid and went over to my friend's house, he used the speech synthesizer to make it say swear words. Then we played with G.I.Joes.

Yeah, the speech synthesizer verges on hilarious if you make it say things like that.

[k8track]

Ah, the TI-99 4/A, my first computer. I have a great deal of affection for this one. Actually, it was my dad's first computer, and we played it when we visited him in Arkansas during the summers when my brother and I were kids. On a black and white monitor (I didn't know what color anything was until years later)! I sat down and went through the manual and taught myself TI's version of BASIC (Call clear! Call sound! Call mom!), and started to write (very) simple programs; some even had graphics! That was where I started to compose music using a computer, and I just recently transferred all of my old TI-99 songs (along with my C64 ones) into MP3 format, so now I can jam to those bitchin' old tunes in my car. Fresh!

My dad also had all the old issues of 99er magazine, which became Home Computer Magazine, and he typed all of the game programs from them and saved them onto cassette. Occasionally, he would make me type some! Anyone else remember doing that? If you made one typo, you had to go back through and try to find it one line at a time (kind of like badly-wired Christmas lights). I enjoyed some of those games just as much, if not a little more, than the official cartridge games. But my best memories were making my own music.

There is one thing I have been desperately looking for my system, and I hope I'm not inappropriately intruding in this thread, but it seemed like an opportune moment. All I'm looking for is a power cord for the TI cassette drive. Anyone have an extra one to sell or trade or give? When I bought a cassette drive from 4jays about 3 or 4 years ago, they didn't include one. I've never been able to get them to give me one since. It's a long shot, but I had to try.

Enjoy your golden find, aclbandit!

[diskoboy]

[Jorpho]

Anyone else remember doing that? If you made one typo, you had to go back through and try to find it one line at a time (kind of like badly-wired Christmas lights).

It was a painful introduction to an activity that would plague me for the rest of my life. Now there's something you'd think angry parents would be crusading against! (It didn't help that the books I was using often did not distinguish sufficiently between I and 1 or O and 0.)

All I'm looking for is a power cord for the TI cassette drive. Anyone have an extra one to sell or trade or give?

Is it really completely nonstandard? If it's just a standard bipolar cable without any transformer in it, surely some other appliance cord might work?

For a second there I thought that was a real disk listing, until I saw the filename.

[aclbandit]

All I'm looking for is a power cord for the TI cassette drive. Anyone have an extra one to sell or trade or give? When I bought a cassette drive from 4jays about 3 or 4 years ago, they didn't include one. I've never been able to get them to give me one since. It's a long shot, but I had to try.

Enjoy your golden find, aclbandit!

Could you perhaps find me a picture of what one looks like somewhere? I have a huge LOAD of cables that I found for the thing, and, to be honest, I don't have a clue what most of them do. Find me a picture, I'll see if I have a spare ^_^

[Steve W]

My dad also had all the old issues of 99er magazine, which became Home Computer Magazine, and he typed all of the game programs from them and saved them onto cassette. Occasionally, he would make me type some! Anyone else remember doing that? If you made one typo, you had to go back through and try to find it one line at a time (kind of like badly-wired Christmas lights). I enjoyed some of those games just as much, if not a little more, than the official cartridge games.

The TI was my first computer, too. And I had loads of fun typing magazine game programs. I think one single program ran right away without crashing the first time I started it. Shocked the hell out of me. All the others had typos in them, so I'd have to comb through the BASIC listings to find them. And doing that helped me to understand how programs worked, and how to modify them. Good times. I miss that every once in a while. Although those Extended BASIC 64-character lines for sprite graphics got to be annoying to type in accurately. And I only had a few copies of the 99'er, but I was with Home Computer Magazine from the first issue to the last. Even had a bunch of the data cassettes.

I've got the Oscar bar code reader, which was allegedly going to be the wave of the future. All type-ins would have the bar codes in the books too so you could just swipe the reader across the pages instead of all that typing. Too bad it never took off.

I've also acquired a Milton Bradley Expansion System (MBX for short). It comes with an external keyboard/base unit, an analog joystick (like Atari's Space Age Joystick, but with a spinning joystick and three fire buttons), and a head mounted microphone for voice recognition.

One TI related item I've always wanted but haven't ever seen in the wild is X-10 Home Automation's TI Home Computer Module for controlling all my household appliances with my good ol' TI-99/4A. I remember seeing them in Triton catalogs and such, but didn't have any desire to get them. Now I would like them just for the sake of curiosity. And I've wondered throughout the years if the X-10 could be used with the MBX's voice recognition. That would be seriously cool.