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Already found things that I never found in first room. I never thought to watch the fan. Lol

Do you happen to know which is faster, DISPLAY or PRINT? Also, if you timed these, how did you time these commands/statements?

You should wear some aviator glasses with a mic like that

lol

Hi, is the extended basic cart required for the expansion system to operate?

I found this video one of the most interesting video's you have made, and this game is awesome. You should publish something on the methods that were used to make this game. Thinking outside of the box often leads to the creativity and pushing the limits of any platform.

We miss your excellent videos! Hope you are well.

Oh I wonder if someone could make some unholy RS232 union between the CC40 and an HP graphing calculator from the 90’s. They had their own proprietary cable that actually just spoke RS232.

What is the song playing in Jawbreaker II? Has haunted me for years.. same in mouse attack - Sierra on line liked using it apparently

Great video, I loved TI Forth running from the PEB, it make me feel like a real programmer.

5075 Reichert Greens

I went to a RETRO gaming con recently and I saw a TI994A and it was the scrolling bottom up game where it looks like you are in a trench. It was not moon miner or whatever. It it is knd of a striped pattern. I neglected to take the name down. I remember playing it a lot.

I have one of these! Got it for $30 long ago and have never known what to do with it, back when there was almost no mention of it online. This is wonderful!

Hi all. Thanks for all the inquiries. PP is well, she's just focusing on other interests, right now. No concrete plans for the future, just following her passions. All the best and lots of love and thanks for all the support! (The bigots can suck it.)

Ryan Islands

I always find it a bit irritating when I hear people taking uneducated jabs at TE-II. I know that many people bought this module solely for the text-to-speech capabilities, and that's fine! I think many of those same people either didn't know what a terminal emulator does or played with it for 5 minutes and thought it was a pretty lousy one at best. Its biggest downside was the fact that it only supported 110 and 300 baud, but you have to consider the times. Later, there were users installing load interrupt switches on their consoles, and by using software that stayed resident through the swapping of modules, one could insert the TE-II module, select 300 baud, then push the load interrupt button, and suddenly you had TE-II running at 1200 baud. I think some people wanted to use it for dialing into bulletin board systems (BBS), but by the time that became popular among us most faithful TI'ers, there was already other terminal emulation software available that seemed much more snappy than TE-II and could handle speeds of up to 19200 baud without crashing. Not to mention more up-to-date file transfer protocols, such as X, Y, and Z-modem. After this, the terminal emulation function of TE-II was mostly forgotten and discredited. But TI definitely had other plans for TE-II from the start, which was the main reason they decided to implement text-to-speech into this module. The fact that you can access these capabilities through the DSR using regular file access commands was purely an afterthought. Text-to-speech wasn't the only thing they added. TE-II was a much-anticipated upgrade to a comparatively inferior product known simply as "Terminal Emulator" (some refer to it as TE-I). You see, TI had partnered with an information service called "The SOURCE" (not dissimilar to other services of the day, such as CompuServe*) to develop a white-label product, which became known as "TEXNET." It offered all the functionality of The SOURCE but with added features specifically designed for TI users, such as enhanced support for graphics, sound, speech, and a proprietary file transfer protocol. Essentially, TEXNET was a TI-branded version of The SOURCE's service, but re-imagined to offer very TI-centric user experiences. To do this, TI had to develop their own protocols for tasks like changing screen modes, defining and placing color graphics, defining and playing sound tables, and speaking (in both text-to-speech and LPC dictionary words). There were previously no known standards for this. It had to be very efficient and able to work reliably over 7-bit data with possible errors, albeit still very slow over 300 baud. But I'd just like to remind everyone how amazing this could have been 12 years before the Internet or any web browser as we know it! To be honest, I never had access to TEXNET or any of those services. They were far too expensive for a 17-year-old at the time. I was lucky enough to have a fully decked-out TI system. I am unaware of how successful TEXNET was. There is very little information about it. Most of the people I've spoken to about it over the years were not privy to it or the extended capabilities of the TE-II module. But just remember... Inside every TE-II command module lies what is quite possibly one of the world’s first color graphics terminals. And I'd be willing to wager that a good 99% of people who've ever owned a TE-II module never knew of its awesome potential. There's some new development going on over here - something I've been working on sporadically for about 3.5 years now, whenever time permits. I had the idea to bring back my old TI BBS (which was written in TMS9900 assembler language), except this time around, I want to do it the way TI envisioned their TEXNET service. But it would require a patched version of TE-II running on an emulator. So I contacted Mike Brent (aka Tersi/HarmlessLion) asking him how much it would cost to get real serial support going in Classic99. His response was basically no, it’s about time, not money. I couldn't disagree with the sentiment, but it left me with this empty space of wanting something, knowing the only way I was going to get it was to do it myself! It's been a few years now, and there's still no serial support to speak of in Classic99. I'm not sure if I should mention this because I can't promise any release dates or anything, but I started development on a Windows version of TE-II. So far, all of the color graphics protocols are intact, and as of last weekend, the sound is starting to show signs of life. The underpinnings of this are not a TI emulator but rather a TE-II simulator that is very aesthetically and behaviorally correct, minus a few annoying bugs. It can work with a real modem over a serial/USB-to-serial interface at speeds up to 115200 baud. It has a built-in telnet client, and you can set the simulated baud rate for telnet connections. It’s kind of neat because I have extended the TE-II protocols even further without stepping on any other features. This allows telnet in certain scenarios to agree on a simulated speed (so the simbaud works in both directions). There is also a separate companion program, which is a serial-to-telnet bridge for those with real TI hardware who want to witness firsthand what the TE-II is really capable of. The new BBS version is written in Perl. It's a console-level script that requires telnet and/or modem bridges to allow people to connect to it. The bridges (server-side) are written in Python. All of that runs in a Debian Linux VM. At the moment, any connection to it provides only a quick demo of the graphics capabilities and one song (from Alpiner - the song that plays after you've made it to the top of the mountain). Sound is only working on a real TE-II module but will soon be fully working on my TE-II simulator. I figure this is about as authentic as anything can be these days. Services such as TEXNET would have been running on old "big iron" UNIX anyway. It wouldn't have been necessary to have the service end running on TI hardware (as many people may think.) It would have been severely under-powered. To access any of this, you'll need either a copy of my TE-II simulator (which I’m not giving out just yet) or the serial-to-telnet bridge (for Windows), real TI-99/4(A) hardware, a serial interface, and a TE-II module. I would consider sharing the bridge software if you wanted to showcase some pretty rare features of TE-II on a real TI. Yes, that was directed to you, @PixelPedant. * As a peculiar side note, these dial-up services (which long pre-date the Internet) were often referred to as "data-bases" because they offered many live and updated streams of information, usually only text-based, but pertaining to news, weather, sports, stock trading, etc.

I didn't recognze a lot of the last era games besides the Micro Pinball, Junkman Jr, and Burger Time. I had the whole setup with the PEB, disk drive, and memory expansions that I had gotten from my grandfather. I never used the modem. My grandfather even made a mod that was inside the Speech Synthesizer (I think he called it an EEPROM mod?) that gave me a ton more games that I could play beyond the original library of games. I wish I had kept it now. But my mom sold it off when I was in the military.

thanks for putting this together, i have a lot of memories associated with that shiny box. ❤

I too wanted to check in and make sure everything was okay! Hope all is well. ❤

Oh yeah I got that silver 99/4A at a swap meet today! I had the beige one since 2007 but the graphics card started to go bad in 2014 it took me 10 years and I am happy to have another working one.

Kassandra Estate

Carter Ridge

Balistreri Ridges

Polly Rue

Where are the new videos? 5 months overdue... Love your work

Ankunding Square

Hoping you make more videos - been wondering where you were. Lots of people love these, and many of the guys you talk about end up showing up in your comments!

Casper Squares

Aiden Row

All of that `CALL THING(x,y,z)` Stuff reminds me of the BASIC on our school's Research Machines 380Z... I only ever saw it there and not in any other implementation... never thought to look back to Dartmouth for where it must have come from.

Any plans on making more videos?

Did you use a shader for the recording of this video? I'm not totally sure, but to me the pixels in the gameplay look like they are casting a faint shadow as if they were displayed using an LCD screen.

I find myself rewatching one of these videos at least every other week.

Missing your TI-99 videos!

32004 Zboncak Inlet

I miss these Tunnels of Doom videos of yours so much. Very well researched. Another thing I miss? When video games used to say, "Good Luck." Such a simple thing, but it was like a little connection between the developers and the players. I don't think any game has said that nice little message in about 40 years.

Any new videos coming out?

Paucek Plaza

I sold these machines in my younger days but almost never used one. Now I have gained interest again and found your great videos. Will look trough them and follow you in the coming years. You being yourself - of course that also works fine by me. I applaud you ❤️

Moore Joseph Martin Elizabeth Young Donna

Awesome result 😍😍😍

Didn't TI prevent 3rd party cartridge development by not documenting how to make the TI boot off of the cartridge?

Are you a new host? The guy before had a beard and mustache.

Great video! I hope you have more videos up your sleeve for us, soon! 😀

Such a lovely port. And you played really good🙂

Loved this game played on 99/4a once played for18 hrs straight

Great! I started my computing life with TI 99 4A in 1983

please come back sweetheart!

I've heard this uses the Expander's rotation feature so you can fly backwards and shoot or rotate towar the target while resting to shoot quicker, is that right?

I just picked one of these up at a yard sale. It's great to have videos like this to learn more about the TI 99 history.