The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A

I'll never forget the TI-99/4A. I was 8 years old, in second grade in Southern California. We had a "computer lab" which was a mobile building with 13 or 15 TI-99/4A's, and about half of them had color TV's and the rest, B+W. Nobody really knew anything, but we did have books to copy BASIC programs out of.

One kid entered a program that flashed colors and patterns on the color TV. Our teacher was epileptic, and this sent her into a seizure. Myself and another kid ran to get the 5th grade teacher who'd been a doctor at some point (don't ask, I dont know, I was 8) and he came running and attended to her. She was fine.

I'd always been interested in how things work, taking things apart, playing with my 30-in-1 electronics lab from Radio Shack. But this new computer thing... this was something. That experience flipped a bit in my 8 year old brain. All because of a TI-99/4A.

I still have my TI-99/4A! I received it Christmas morning of 1983, although a Timex/Sinclair had been on my wish list. Sears had them marked down to $50 during the 8-bit wars. Mom had been up all night hand-typing in a BASIC demo so it would be running in the morning. Many Wumpuses were hunted that day.

Today, it has a F17A video processor that enables VGA output: https://dnotq.io/f18a/intro.html

And a FinalGROM99 cartridge, so I can have an SD card with all the program cartridges loaded. https://endlos99.github.io/finalgrom99/

There's still a community of fairly active development for retrogames, and some of them are quite good given capabilities of the hardware. My niece particularly enjoys a marble game called Skyway, try it on the online emulator at https://ti99ers.com

I have such mixed feelings about the TI-99/4A.

It was our family computer. We rented games for it, and that was fun. I learned BASIC. I tried to create things with it, as advertised, and sort of only semi-succeeded repeatedly.

My parents saw that I was running into the limits of the system, and got me both the Extended Basic and Terminal Emulator II cartridges. I dug into Extended Basic, and was able to write "games" with actual sprites that could be manipulated! There they were, flying around, those sprites. That being said, these games always ended up being quite bad, and there wasn't a clear path for them to being much better. We were part of a users group, and the Extended Basic games others were making were perhaps more refined but also honestly not much better.

At the same time, Atarisoft were releasing epic cartridges for the TI. A strangely OK Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac Man, as good or better than on the other home computers. It was clear there was no path at all from whatever was going on with the Extended Basic cartridge to whatever magic voodoo allowed for the TI ports of these arcade games. (To be honest, I still don't really understand it, other than something to do with... GROM? Assembly?)

On the other hand, Terminal Emulator II, which my parents bought me so I could fool around with the TI's speech synthesizer, taught me about the need to connect to online services via a modem. I asked my parents about getting a modem, and they were like... "no".

My pre-teen brain was like "I need to buy myself a modem as soon as I can!"

I bought a 1200 baud modem out of Computer Shopper for mere dollars when I was 16. It changed my life. I got on boards, and then the Internet, before most - and probably you. I learned networking and architecture. No regrets.

But I still have no idea whatsoever how those TI programmers bridged the gap between my horrifically bad Extended Basic programs, where I felt I had maxed out the capabilities of the computer, and the magnificent games and arcade ports available via cartridge. It sort of haunts me. What even?

I guess next week they're going to get to the interesting bit which is how weird the architecture actually was on that thing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A

Particularly it only had 256 bytes of RAM attached to the CPU but had (I think) 16 kb of RAM attached to the video controller which the CPU could read and write through I/O registers. You could use this for non-video storage but you couldn't access it directly.

Coding in BASIC could, at the very least, hide the insanity from you.

OK, this seems like a good thread to ask about something that was contemporary to the TI-99/4A ... namely, the idea of "Fairware". As near as I can tell this term was coined to refer to freeware at a time when that term was still trademarked by Andrew Fluegelman / Headlands Press, and seems largely to have been current among TI-99/4A users (probably because after their platform got orphaned freeware/fairware was all they had), but not so much anywhere else (with a few exceptions, and then probably because by the time anyone had heard of it Andrew was dead and his trademark died not long after, so everyone took to calling freeware 'freeware'... or shareware, since that term had also been coined to get around that trademark).

Anyway, the question is: Who actually coined the term "fairware"? I did some preliminary research in old periodicals and books, but I never came to a satisfactory answer. The closest I found it that it might have been one of the sysops of the TI conference on ... I think either Compuserve or GEnie? Either way, I never found any smoking gun, and this is one of those bits of historical trivia where not knowing the answer irritates me greatly. I tried asking around on the Atari Age forums, but I guess the right kind of graybeards don't hang out around there. Maybe someone here will know the answer?

My dad taught me to read with Dr Seuss and the TI-99/4A BASIC programming manual. Starting writing my first programs at 4. Love that old machine. There was a sort of Gradius knock off for it called Parsec that I played the hell out of too.

When I was a little older I would borrow books at the library to write games in BASIC. Basically key stuff in that the book told you to write, and since a lot of it was for the C64 or TRS-80 I had to figure out how to “port” it to the TI. I wrote notes for my changes in pencil in the library books so I wouldn’t get in trouble with the librarian. Invariably I’d check the book out again a few weeks after I’d returned it. I was probably the only person who read my notes, but I like to think someone got some use out of my addenda.

I used TI99/4As at school in the Isle of Man at age 16 or so. I thought they were sad, rather crippled things then. Horribly slow, limited BASIC, and the school didn't have Extended BASIC cartridges.

I still wonder... Could TI have made a non-crippled TI99 at the time that wouldn't have been vastly more expensive?

I know there was the planned, prototyped, and cancelled TI99/8:

http://www.99er.net/998art.html

http://www.99er.net/998.html

64kB RAM, Extended BASIC as standard, expandable to 15MB.

But that would have cost a fortune at the time.

I'm just wondering if a TI99/4 with 32kB of RAM attached directly to the CPU and maybe a better BASIC would have been achievable for not much more?

The 99/8 never shipped but the Geneve 9640 shows what the architecture could do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneve_9640

The graphics chip on this thing was a big deal. Variants ended up in the ColecoVision, the MSX line of computers and Sega's SG-1000 console. Later machines like the MSX2 and the Sega Master System had backwards-compatible but entirely different evolutions of the design.

Quite an impact for a graphics chip coming from a rather unsuccessful computer. I never played around with or even saw a TI-99 but from my understanding the CPU needing to use VRAM as data storage (because the system RAM was way too low for the time), accessed through IO ports, really hampered the machine.

While it lacked the hardware scrolling, massive master palette and display list tricks of the Atari machines, it displayed multi-color high-resolution graphics with ease. Being able to set a different color for each line of a background tile allowed for really detailed art.

Only 4 sprites per line like the Atari (not counting the weird missiles), but the TI-99 sprites are 16 pixels wide and high-resolution, rather than 8 fat pixels wide, and there's 32 to work with in total rather than needing to use raster splits to multiplex sprites.

Way ahead of its time. MSX homebrew games like Mini Ghost, The Cure, Invasion of the Zombie Monsters, etc. really show what it can do.

I do so love the TI-99/4A. I've been going through some TI-99/4A disk archives from the Chicago Texas Instruments User Group (which streams its meetings every month) and one of my favorite finds so far was this fun demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejGlI0yxqGA

Over at https://js99er.net/ there's a fair bit of software available right from the web interface, as well.

My first computer as well! I remember typing game code from a magazine and saving it to the cassette tape. My big Christmas present the next year was the giant expansion box with the floppy drive.

I wanted the TI-99/4 that was marketed at the beginning of the 80s. As it turned out, I didn't own a computer until buying a Tandy PC-6 pocket computer in the mid-eighties.

Fast forward to buying the later TI-99/4A in the beige case in 2023. Booting it up into the Basic prompt gave me a nice flashback to learning Basic in High School on the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I.

I've also bought its cousin the TI-74 BASICALC. Given hindsight, the TI-74 is my favorite TI-99 for retro computing, even though the similarity is limited to a subset of the TI Basic from the TI-99 family. The TI-74s are rugged and available. It's very useful as a desk calculator.

This was my very first computer, at age 13. I learned hexadecimal by drawing pictures of spaceships on graph paper, coloring in the squares that had lines through them, splitting the grid into 8x8 sections with a ruler, converting each row of 8 pixels into a hexadecimal number, and then typing them all into DATA statements, just to see the picture take shape on my screen when I ran the program. For some reason, I thought that was just the coolest. About a year later I upgraded to the Commodore 64, but I'll always have a spot in my heart for my TI.

I have dim memories of going to a show in San Francisco’s Brooks Hall(?) called TI-Fest. It was a show all for TI’s home computers and they had the speech synthesizer and some kind of expansion chassis and lots of other stuff. My dad was looking for a home computer that me and my brother could use, so he brought us along. The show was exciting, at least that’s the way I remember it. There was this feeling that something big was happening.

Dad ended up buying an Atari 800 instead of a 99/4A. It was a good decision.

> This would normally result in just being another forgotten also-ran like the Timex Sinclair 2068 (a ZX Spectrum variant for the US that was basically incompatible with all ZX Spectrum software

As proud owner of one, this isn't exactly right.

Turns out one of their factories was in Portugal, so until the 128 K models took off, many Portuguese homes had a Timex instead of the real ZX Spectrum.

And while it was incompatible in default mode, it had an eprom bay that extended its capabilities in various ways, including a being copy of Spectrum 48.

A cartridge that most folks owned as well.

In its incompatible mode, it had a great sound chip, for its time.

The factory was so relevant for Timex culture in Portugal during the 1980's, that there is even a museum.

https://loadzx.com/en/

> And learn - in case you don’t know it yet - about the important role that Portugal played at the TIMEX factory when this phenomenon started in the 80s.

It gets celebrated, not forgotten.

I had one of these growing up, until it was replace with a Tandy 1000 from Radio Shack. Well, I kept it around until I moved into my second house.

I had TI Forth, the huge accessory box, a disk drive, the works. It was fun, I learned quite a bit and have forgotten most of the Forth that I learned.

I had a TI-99/4A. I learned to program from the excellent Basic manual that came with it. I wrote my code on paper, then keyed it in to run.

I mainly wrote basic games for my friends. Most popular was a two player competetive snakes variant, a bit like Tron but with traces only growing as you gobbled up food. I also wrote a 'defender' like game that enjoyed some success amongst friends.

I had no periperals or cartridges as that was too expensive. The living room TV was my monitor. It was quite a while before I got a cassette tape player, so in the early days a computer session started by retyping all code from my notebook.

I later got a ZX Spectrum which was far more powerfull, but the TI (and a HP41cv) are what got me into programming.

Never knew the TI-99/4A was useful for anything but playing Parsec. That’s all I ever did on my BFF Mark’s TI-99/4A. Then I would go home, use my C64 and be grateful my parents didn’t get me a TI-99/4A.

Like a lot of people here, I learned to program on a 99/4A before moving to a PC. The 99/4A was actually great, but looking back very primitive. TI-Basic -> Extended Basic -> Assembly. When I got to the PC, I missed hardware sprites and a real sound chip (a sound card for a PC cost $300 at the time - about $100 more than my TI cost my Dad!).

It always amazed me that the 99/4A had such a vibrant community (that is still creating hardware and software around the machine) and so many outlandish ways to expand the machine.

This brings fun memories of being a kid in deciding which one I am going to pick - Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX80, Commodore PET, Atari 800, etc.

What a diverse selection of personal computers!

I had one when I was like 11 or so. Loved its fake Pacman game. I learned some Basic. Such a distinct memory of spending a whole day copying a program from Byte magazine (or something like it), getting the game to run well after my bedtime, playing it one or two times, then… just turning off the computer, losing all that work. I was never able to convince my mom to buy the fancy tape recorder that would have let me save programs. It was a while till I programmed again, but the seed was definitely planted.

I didn't know the TI-99/4A was 16-bit until many years later when the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were taking over from the Spectrum, C-64 and Amstrad (in the UK). Aside from the refueling tunnels getting a bit tricky later on in Parsec, I have fond memories of Alpiner and Pirate's Adventure. That latter one being the bundled game with the Adventure cartridge, requiring you to insert the cartridge (containing parser etc., I think) and then load the particular adventure story from tape.

My uncle had one of these and it was the first machine I ever used. I can still remember the mechanic click of the keys and the feel of the joystick.

Loved this game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_Invaders

They bought this machine because it was the best value for the hardware specs. I didn’t realize TI actually lost money on the hardware until reading this article

I had one for a while in my early teens and it had the floppy disk drive option. I did some sprite and graphics programming. It's obviously been a long time and I was young so I could be mistaken, but one bad experience I had with it was that the filesystem considered a file either a program or data and there was no obvious way (to me) to switch between the two. Well one day the machine decided that my basic files were data and not programs and so I lost them.

I loved my little TI-99/4A...

I used to lay down in the living room and transcribe BASIC from COMPUTE! magazine into it, and customize them, and that's how I learned to program.

I only had a TI-85 to impress girls with polar equations.

One thing TI (Extended) Basic had for it that was almost unique among early home computers was its use of decimal floating point with 13 digits precision. It was so useful for maths. I used it a lot at that time in high school. When I switched to an Apple II with its 5 byte binary floats, man was it a disappointment. It was faster, yes, but, boy oh boy, what a catastrophic loss of precision.

My first computer. Played Blast-O!, Hunt The Wumpus, Chisolm Trail, A-MAZE-ING, and a couple other games. Learned the crummy programming language of TI-BASIC, gave up on software and stuck with hardware ever since.

Funny enough, now as part of my job, I advise TI on various upcoming power ranges for various lighting types, and they do on occasion make an IC based on my specs for general production.

Anybody with interest in the video chip, the TMS9918A, might like the Pico 9918 project, a drop-in replacement that uses a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Top 5 faves as a kid

anything 6502 SBC -- hex code / assembly, later BASIC, etc. Timex Sinclair -- disabled screen for run so CPU could save screen code cycles TRS-80 CoCo -- poke 65535,65536, 65537 -- clock 1x, overclock 2x, 3x TI99/4a -- sprites + cartridges + accessible PC Jr + Turbo Pascal -- first compiler in

Wasn’t this originally designed for military use?

It failed the requirements and was then repurposed by TI?

There is a working one in the gaming area of the Computer History Museum in Roswell, GA. The instructions direct you to play the Wumpus game but you can go to ti-basic and other programs instead.

It seems irresponsible to put "8-bit" in the title of the blogpost and never mention anywhere that the TI-99/4A was a 16-bit machine.

Basically, a whole lot like the ColecoVision, Sega SG-1000, or MSX, but without the Z80?

I have one. It was the first computer that was completely mine.

I was disappointed in what the embedded basic could give me...it was slow, it had sprite-only graphics exposed (couldn't draw a vector from X,Y to X,Y) and my parents only bought touch typing tutor.

and in my boredom, I'd slot and pull the cartridge which made it do -interesting- things...dumping memory space to what would eventually be called a frame buffer...and when it did, it would show cycling bitmaps at a much higher speed than you'd ever be able to do with Basic.

So you could see the potential, but a 12 year old with nothing but a tape drive and one cartridge couldn't and didn't know how to touch it.

And 4 months after spending $350 for it, Sears was closing them out for $50. Which was why, a few years later, when I wanted an Amiga, Dad bought an XT clone. It's support and software cpabilities was much improved over the TI.

the 99/4A was my first real computer. I was 8 or 9 at the time. Programming ensued. Sprites were magic.

My first computer!

The 99/4 & 4A have such a great place in my heart. One of my uncles worked for TI (he was the exec sponsor for the Speak & Spell.) My mom had a LINC for a while and my dad bought a TRS-80 when it came out. So when the 99/4 was about to be released, we got the full court press from my uncle: there's a new 16 bit computer with color and sound and all sorts of cool features.

So we bought a 99/4. Pretty sure we got the friends and family discount. Many don't remember the original 99/4 released in '79, but it was definitely a weird beast. In retrospect it was very clear TI couldn't decide whether it was a console gaming system to compete with the Atari VCS or a personal computer to compete with the Atari 800, Apple ][, TRS-80 or Commodore PET. Peripherals were originally (large) boxes that chained off the side of the main unit. We had a speech synthesizer, memory expansion, RS-232 interface and floppy controller, so we wound up buying a special cable to let us move the chain to a different part of the desk.

To a modern audience, the most interesting part of the confusion between being a personal computer or game console might have been TI's attitude towards 3rd party software developers. If you wanted to write software for the 99/4, the first thing they wanted you to do was to give them $10k. And this was back in the late 70s, when $10k was a chunk of change. Companies like Milton-Bradley ponied up the cash for a license and a dev system (which I think was a $25k 990 system.) I wrote a couple games for the Apple ][, put floppies in a zip-lock and sold them through the local ByteShop. I think I sold 10 copies. For a kid in Jr. High, the $50 in profit I made was real money. I could not even conceive of where I would get $10k for a license to make anything for the 99/4.

In '81, TI released an upgraded version called the 99/4A, which was mostly identical, but had the upgraded video chip (the 9918A vs the 9918) and lower case characters (actually small caps, but who cares.) Even though there was plenty of data to suggest this Nintendo-esque approach to 3rd party software was more of a games console thing than a personal computer thing, TI stuck with it. I think the beige models of the 99/4A that started coming out in '83 before they exited the market included scrambled entry-points to various OS calls to make it harder for people to make unlicensed software (didn't AtariSoft run afoul of this? or maybe it was ActiVision. I know one of the "big names" didn't want to pay for the license and thus didn't get the "secret" information about how to properly call I/O functions on the beige machines.)

My uncle participated in researching a book on TI's corporate history in the late 90s / early 2000s. I helped him out a bit and one day called the main corporate library asking for any public info they might have on the 99/4. They claimed TI never made a machine called the 99/4 or 99/4A and I must be thinking about the TI-84 calculator. Maybe they just wanted to forget the whole thing or maybe I had reached the calculator library. In any event, most of the people I talked with who were involved in the project thought it was a failure and don't seem to want to share their memories. This is kinda sad. I loved my little 99/4, quirks and all.

Oh, alright...I'll be that guy. All respect to those infected with this particular strain of nostalgia, but I hated that piece of crap.

I was starting to program back in those halcyon days (BASIC and fortunately for my later life, Fortran), so my dad got me one. Probably because it was cheap. Cheap it was, and slow. Like, my friends VIC20 seemed faster (but then, he had a floppy, more on that later). And the games were mostly inferior to anything on something like the C64. And they were games none of my friends had, or more importantly, my friends had games I couldn't. And the business apps, according to my dad, were 'just shit'.

OK...I will give the thing one huge props: it had a relatively cheap voice synthesizer "sidecar" thing, that my dad actually sprung for. It. Was. AWESOME. Write a little BASIC program and a robot voice would call your friend a 'butthead' or something. For a couple of days I was the most popular kid in the neighborhood and everyone had to see (hear) this thing. And then...they all went "cool man, but we're gonna go and play Fargoal or Double Dragon or whatever that you don't have and don't know how to play". So back alone with my 99/4a calling my friends 'butthead', but now in a sad way.

But dad bought it for me to program on, so let's do that. The BASIC was...okay, I guess, but since it was some TI thing unrelated to MS BASIC used by pretty much everyone else at the time I couldn't compare notes with and get help from my friends with sane parents who had gotten their kids a C64, Atari 800 or TRS-80. The Logo cart was actually pretty fun, but it was also it's own thing and more of a toy to play with; moving the turtle around the screen got old quick. I probably should have gotten the assembler cart, but I didn't know that was probably the only way to really have fun programming the thing. Nut anyway...I'm a couple of BASIC programs in, and a floppy sure would be nice (read: required). Oh, you want floppy? You have to buy the giant expansion box, which is 5 times bigger than and costs more than the computer. And then buy the floppy. And probably a memory expansion.

At this point dad realized he'd been sold a bill of goods, did the math, knew what a sunk cost is, and went out and bought a TRS-80 4P for a lot more than the TI. Added CP/M, Turbo Pascal, 123 and Wordstar and a modem and I was off to the races. Got me all the way to my second year of college or so.

At some point in the '90s, a buddy showed me around his new job (manufacturing) and we spent some time on the TI-990 minicomputer he was in charge of. I remember thinking "if this is what is possible with a 9900, they had to have worked hard crippling it for the 99/4a".

This is where my programming journey began! Somewhere, tucked away in a scrapbook, is a handwritten set of BASIC instructions I wrote around 1983 when I would have been about 6 (probably for an Apple IIe, not this computer).

My dad bought it with the stated intent of writing a program that would display ASCII art associated with a keypress, to help me learn the alphabet and reading (e.g., pressing "A" would have brought up an ascii art apple). He claimed that he was only able to make it halfway through the alphabet before running out of storage on the cassette tape.

He would later go on to be a sysadmin at Cleveland FreeNet (as a hobby), and in the early 1980s was the first principal to put a "computer lab" in our local high school.

I have many fond memories of playing Munch Man (and, I think, Parsec) on this home computer.