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OMG, the TI-99/4A was a WACKO machine. The TMS9900 CPU was a real gem,
Not a machine I have much experience with. The only one I ever used was in the early 90s at a friend's house. It was a souped-up system, hard drive and special video adapter. It was the family machine of a girl I was trying to date, but she has no interest. Both of us 15 I think. She was only interested in 20-somethings.
My vintage machine of choice is the TRS-80 Model III. My Dad bought one when I was 6, identical to the machines he used at work. Cassette only at first, then a single double density floppy and 48k RAM. Not a bad platform.
I learned BASIC, Z80 assembly, and FORTRAN on that box. Tandy's FORTRAN wasn't F77 compliant, especially with regard to string handling, so I mostly reverted to assembly. Lots of good emulators around for the Z80 now.
I just like "Hunt The Wumpus".
It is kind of like INTV AD&D - only more primitive. It is actually a blend of that and Minesweeper, I guess. You have to figure out what room the Wumpus is in - which is basically Minesweeper with 1 flag, in a maze like INTV AD&D.
This made me remember I had a dream where I was IN the Atari 2600 Adventure game recently. Realized the dragons aren't limited by walls because they can FLY. Woke up going, "epiphany".
45 years later.
Tue Mar 10 2026 18:14:48 UTC from IGnatius T FoobarOMG, the TI-99/4A was a WACKO machine. The TMS9900 CPU was a real gem, it could run a much bigger machine if you let it just sit on the bus and run at full speed. You could say it was a 16-bit CPU forced to breathe through a soda straw. Between the 8-bit DRAM, the 8-bit system bus, the bank switched ROMs and RAMs, video RAM being accessible only through two internal I/O ports instead of memory map ... it was the brain of a very capable multiuser machine trapped inside a toy computer.
OMG, the TI-99/4A was a WACKO machine. The TMS9900 CPU was a real gem,
My childhood friend had one of these when we were about 5 years old. First and last time I ever saw one of them. He might have had a few games for it, I don't remember what we did with it as my memories off that thing are all conflated with playing Empire Strikes Back on the adjacent Atari... but it was a weird machine...
So if you had a TI-99/4A you probably had Car Wars, TI Invaders, Parsec, Tombstone City, and maybe a few others. Parsec was the big thrill. Everything else was more playable on the Atari 2600 you probably also owned at the time.
After I got bored I usually headed back to the CP/M machine we had in the house at the time.
This was exactly the problem. I upgraded from the A2600 to the Vic 20 - and thought it sucked. It had a 20 col screen - not even 40 col, on your TV, about 5k of usable RAM - and bad I/O - but as an adult, I look back at the games and realize they were WAY better than the Atari 2600 titles - but availability and accessibility made the 2600 the "better" gaming system. The Vic 20 was a way better gaming platform - especially with RAM upgrades - but it was just very difficult to get titles for it back then. Now, I want one, and have very good versions of it via FPGA via MiSTer.
Wed Mar 25 2026 22:34:14 UTC from IGnatius T FoobarAnd that's the problem, TI tried to block the publication of third party titles, and in response, software publishers preferred to ignore the platform completely instead of publish through TI. Funny thing, certain platforms (Nintendo, Apple) get away with that today, but 40+ years ago there were no app stores to make it easy.
So if you had a TI-99/4A you probably had Car Wars, TI Invaders, Parsec, Tombstone City, and maybe a few others. Parsec was the big thrill. Everything else was more playable on the Atari 2600 you probably also owned at the time.
After I got bored I usually headed back to the CP/M machine we had in the house at the time.