Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 62: The TI-99 4A revisited

Episode Date: June 2, 2017

We circle back to the original Retronauts Micro topic to do it proper justice. Ben, Benj, and Jeremy tackle the TI-99/4A: Its history, its games, and... well, that's about it.

This week in Retronauts, it's human instrumentality from Texas. It was like an evangelicalian reference. I mean, I got that. The human instrumentality. I don't know. It's Texas Instruments. I don't know. It's kind of a stretch.

It's been a long afternoon. Hi, everyone. It's Jeremy Parrish with Retronauts Micro. And you're hearing the voices of Benj Edwards. Ben Elgin. And also me, Jeremy Parrish, but I mentioned that already. So today we are going to kind of revisit. the original Retronauts Microtopic.

When I kicked off this series back in, I don't know, 2014-ish, 2015, I can't remember a long time ago. The very first topic I covered was Texas Instruments' Ti-99-4-A computer. But that was me monologuing for like seven minutes, which is not nearly as interesting or informative as a full conversation about the system. So I've invited two guys who know a lot about the system and its games to come in and talk about it with me. And this is going to be sort of a

like a companion piece to Retronauts Microepisode 1. But much, much better. I think this is episode 61 or so. So it's been a while. It's been a lot. Yeah, yeah. We've done a bunch. So I think it's fair to revisit a topic that was kind of covered in brief before and

do it justice. So that's what this episode's going to be. We're going to be able to be able to be. So I think I mentioned in, surely I mentioned in the micro episode before, that I did not own a Texas Instruments computer, but because I lived in Lubbock, Texas, where Ti 99, or sorry, TTI had its plant and manufactured the TI 994A, those things were everywhere. Like every other school system in America had Apple T's, but TI was like no Lubbock Independent School. district, you put TIs in your classroom and they said, okay, so that's what we had. Of course, then the system, you know, ended up being sold for like $49 because of price competition and yeah, it went badly. So at that point, it was super cheap and everyone could own one. Yeah, so I had

one at home and I have a feeling it was probably after the price dropped a lot. Um, uh, my parents but I actually asked my parents if they remembered why we bought this particular one as opposed to any of the competing, you know, Commodores or Amiga's or whatever, and they had no idea. I was in the Midwest, but not Texas up in St. Louis. But it was probably after the price dropped and it was affordable. And this was actually the first computer that I had that was mostly mine. And it was before, you know, I had an NES.

So this was where I had games and computer stuff when I was small. I think the TI-99-4A was one of the, the first machines I got as a collector in the early 90s when I was still a kid, but my dad bought me one at a ham fest, you know, a secondhand model. And I came from an Atari 800 sort of school of thought. And the TI was incredible, like the solid state software cartridges you push in there. I mean, they're like any other cartridge, but I love the fact that you push them in horizontally and they just work. Yeah, it was really different. And computers based on cartridges were pretty uncommon. The MSX

did that, but they can't think of any others. It was this sort of, it was in this hybrid space between personal computers and consoles, although consoles weren't really a thing yet. Yeah, I mean, I guess some of the Atari computers. Yeah, you had Tari's, Commodores. They were all based on... Yeah, you had Atari's and Commodores. I always thought it's Commodore as like a

discette-based thing. But yeah, so it was this hybrid where it had aspects of a personal computer you could program on it. But it also had these cartridges that were just standalone games, but it also had, you could add all kinds of wacky peripherals to it, including, like, the audio cassette, you could record your programs to audio cassette, which was just kind of weird, but great. And there were a whole bunch of

other peripherals you could put into it. You could expand it with, like, voice synthesis. That was the cool one. Yeah, we should step back for a second. Think about the precursor to the 4A, which was the 4. The T.994, right? Before we do that, I think we should just talk about T.I. Oh, gosh. And really step back. Yeah. I think it's important to get the context. So Texas Instruments, you probably know them from their calculators because they still make them, and they're kind of the standard for graphing calculators and so on and so forth. Back in the 70s, though, TI didn't just make calculators. They also made mini computers.

Many computers aren't something that really exist anymore. But this was back in the days when the microcomputer, which is what we think of as computers now, was still kind of this pie-in-the-sky concept. I mean, they started developing the T.I.99 for the system that eventually became the 99 in like 1976. So it was kind of contemporaneous with the Apple One. Yeah. So, yeah, so basically, TI had two different schools of microprocessors that they developed. This was in the days when it wasn't just Intel and Arm and Motorola making chips.

It was everybody, everyone was making their own semiconductors. So, TI had, you know, their calculator chips, but then they also had their 16-bit processor for their mini-computers. And they said, let's get into the microcomputer market and make an 8-bit chip. And they failed. They did not make an 8-bit chip. They made a 16-bit chip and said, well, let's just put this in our computer. Oh, I remember now.

Yeah, their microprocessor, that TMS, what was it? 99, 9900. Yeah, it was just a single-chip version of their. CPU board from one of their mainframe computers. So they accidentally sort of inadvertently in 1980 created the world's most powerful home computer, but not really.

It was a 16-bit system because they couldn't get their 8-bit chip to work or whatever. They couldn't get the yields up. I don't know what it was. But they kind of hamstrung it. Even though it had this 16-bit processor, like the bus was 8-bit. And it just like the system

couldn't take advantage of everything. But, yeah, it started out as kind of a mess. You wanted to talk about the TI994 and go for it because it was like a, well, it was a big, big mess, honestly. The chicklet keyboard is the biggest mess part of it. No, I'd say the fact that it cost $1,100. I read it was more. It was $1100. It came with a monitor.

It had to come with a monitor because of the mess. They couldn't get, they couldn't get FCC approval on their. their connector so they could only use a specific kind of monitor you couldn't use it with any TV like you could a lot of other computers so it had to come with a specific zenith i think a zenith monitor and yeah that raised the price there's the chicklet keyboard go ahead and talk about that because that's gross well it's just a crappy little keyboard that doesn't it's not like a full touch typing where you push it down and you feel it it's kind of like that mac he's got in his lap chicklet no it has more action too i mean it's more

Or like pushing on wet, soggy grapes. Yeah, chickly keyboards were... Squishy eyeballs. Apple has managed to give some decent scissor action to their tiny, tiny keyboards that was not present in a chickley keyboard from long ago. The whole thing seems like they tried to take this, like, more powerful business computer and just kind of smush it down into a home system, and it really didn't work the first time through.

Like, it just everything was compromised, but still expensive. Yeah, I mean, it was more expensive. expensive than an Apple 2, but much less powerful, much less pleasing to use. It just, it was not good. So that was 1980, I want to say, 1979. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And it just, it was a huge flop.

Okay. I did an article called Design Mistakes, 15 classic PC design mistakes in 2009 for Technologizer. I was thinking, I know I've written about the T.I.99 somewhere, like the original 99. The 994. Yeah. 99 slash 4. Why was it called the 4? It's because they only made four of them.

Oh, okay. That makes sense. I know it's 99 because its chip was the TMS 9900. Yeah. And the 4A was because the video data, digital video display processor, like its serial number ended with an A. But I don't know about the 4. I couldn't find that anywhere. Yeah.

It would happen because they were terrible. Yeah. We'd have to edit this show to let me look up whatever. Anyways, the original phone was bad. That's the takeaway here. So they made a different one, and then it got better. worked sucked. It was too expensive. Yeah, and it had some other problems. I don't remember

something about the power supply or the RF, something. So the 4A was a revision, and they fixed some things, and they made it a lot cheaper, and it suddenly became competitive. Yeah, the 4A was 81, so that was a couple years later. They gave you a better keyboard, like a nice, chunky keyboard

with big old thick keys, and felt good when you press them. It's perfectly good. I think they allowed you to use different kinds of monitors. They finally got the shield. Oh, Ars was played into our TV. yeah yeah um and they also uh they gave you like the daisy chain serial expansion which i don't think it was in the four was it was it was in the four you have a picture of it all sitting in there so they there's that was one of the weirdest quirkiest things about uh the side car expansion

um you could just keep adding things yeah yeah like daisy chaining okay that's normal like everyone does daisy chaining but so if you want a full system you end up with something that's like five feet wide you have to stick in uh like a speech synthesizer there's even a printer that stuck in the side, a 32K RAM expansion, a serial port thing, a disc controller and the disk drive, and like, you know. So imagine that tower meme that goes around with the omega drive and the 32x and yada stacked up about five feet tall and just turn it on its side and then you've got the TI with all its expansion.

Yeah, it's really weird because, you know, they did daisy chaining, but instead of using cables to connect everything, each component is plugged into the other ones. So, yeah, so you have like the keyboard and then like five or things. It became impractical for the desktop. Hope you've got a long desk. One of the nice things that they did with the 994A after like a year or so was create the peripheral expansion box. Pub. Pub. Pub. That's it. Which was, it kind of made the 994A look more like what you think of these days as like a

classic computer. The processor was in the keyboard. That was the computer. But then you had the peb and you put the monitor on top of that. And The peb was a large, I think, aluminum box. It was very durable, but you basically could slot everything into there, and it would be discreet and tucked away. And the cereal bus in there was adjustable and would kind of automatically modify itself to the kind of technology that your card was using. It's a hefty, hefty thing. It's a big old chunk of thing.

It's like heavy. It's got a big power supply. It's got a spot for a disc drive in it. And it's not all capacity with plastic. Yeah, it's much more efficient than having your entire desk just this sprawling mess of connected peripherals. And ours, we didn't even have that. We just had the base system and then we had it plugged into our old CRT TV because you could just like, you could get a CRT adapter for it. Yeah, when I think of the TI994A, I think of the keyboard with the speech synthesizer module plugged into the side.

and then the peripheral expansion box behind it with a monitor on top. That was kind of the way that was sort of the ideal way to use the T.I.994A. Yeah, but most people probably used it with a cassette drive. Yeah, we have a cassette drive. Like a console expense involved. Yeah, it was the cheapest stuff. We should talk just for a minute about one of the reasons that the 994A seemed so sluggish was the fact that its basic was written in an interpreted language.

called GPL graphics programming language. Well, no wonder. So the interpreted language of basic, if you write, you know, if you write a program in basic, it's running on top of another interpreted language that's being interpreted. I did not know that. Yep. No wonder it's super duper slowish, even though it's a 16-bid. Yeah.

But despite some of its quirks, it was an extremely expandable system. One of the interesting things that, you know, in researching this episode, I found is that TI was working on something that kind of functioned like USB, you know, back in the early 80s, where it was like a plug-and-play hot swappable interface. They never got it working, but there is, you know, a certain sort of fan community and developer community that still exists for the TI 994A. And people have actually brought USB to the system. So you can use, you know, this modern interface standard within the 994A, which I don't know

what you would do with that. It's there when the option exists. There's a new video replacement chip thing going on, too, that gives it more colors and stuff that hobbies are doing. I forgot what's called. But you could find it. I mean, I'm sure you could just, you know, USB drive for your basic programs, but I'm not sure what else. Not sure what else you get into it. Somebody made an interface for the Target 800, a USB interface too.

And it's just sort of, for the heck of it. Yeah, it's just like it's the Mount Everest thing. It's there, so you've got to do it. Speaking about it. But, yeah, so TIA. made an interesting computer with some flaws and some good traits. One of the cool things about it was the speech synthesizer module that I touched on, which had really good computer-generated speech.

Do you know why? Why? Speaking spill. They invented the speaking spell. That's right. I interviewed one of the engineers. So that's where the speech synthesis came from was the speak and spell module. The speaking spell chip.

So I interviewed one of the engineers who created a speaking spell. Unfortunately, I forgot his name, but you can find it on vintagecomputing.com, and T.I did that project, and it simulated a human vocal tract in electronics. It was really crazy and advanced for its time. And so they had that technology around, so they put it in a box. Yeah, like this wasn't samples like you would do today. This was actually like just taking raw waveforms and manipulate them until you got stuff that was recognizable. It comes in a really, yeah, it works in a really weird kind of way. Yeah. And that's the little,

kind of little box that you see anytime you see a Ti-994i, you almost always see that little box plugged into the computer. Right side of it. Yeah, it's like almost an oversized mouse, except it's not, it's the speech synthesizer. So I don't actually have the speech synthesizer, but I do have the one person.

I know, but I do have the TI 94 and I do have a speak and spell. Can I make these two up together? If you want one. I've got two one together. I want to plug my speak and spell into the TI and see what happens. Sure, you might accidentally phone UT's home planet. That's That's true. That's true.

Oh, we came for you, buddy. You want to play TI Invaders? Yeah. So, games? Yeah, so, um... That killed them. Games. Yeah, the weird thing about the TI is that Texas instruments did not allow licensing, per se.

They did not... They were, like, super strict about things. They wanted, like, if someone wanted to publish on TI, they needed to do it through TI. Kind of like Nintendo wants to do. Even more so, but, yeah. But the thing is, Nintendo didn't really bring that licensing program into existence until they had a pretty good lock on the Japanese market. Ti did

not have a lock on the American market and there were a lot of competing computer standards and so third parties said okay no thanks we'll go with other companies and so no games that you recognized showed up on TI. Unless you caught a lot

of homebrew knockoffs. Later, later there were Atari soft ports. Later on there were actual ports. But in the early years in the early years it was all like rewritten knockoffs. There were some Sega cartridges. Yeah. They were even coming a Sega cartridge style.

I didn't have any of those, but if you search some Kongo Bongo shows up towards the end of its lifespan where they were actual... Ango Bongo was on there? Yeah. I saw that. I saw that on everything. I saw that on there. But that was much like...

I have that cartridge. The first few years, it was all T.I.'s in-house stuff. And like Frogger or something. They were probably rare, and it was probably the later 80s, kind of. Okay. Yeah. So why do we talk about the games that did come out when, you know, in the heyday? The two-year period where this was a viable system.

pretty much all of them were made by TI some of them were original some of them were adaptations of classic concepts and some of them were just straight up reboffs of popular arcade games that's pretty much the three categories of TI games so yeah I've got a list here that I put together and I see that you guys have added to it so why don't we just go for it

sure what's the mean do we want to start with the straight off riff-offs and move up to the more interesting things yeah let's talk about the rip-ops So, like, we had, you know, we had Munch Man. Guess what that was a rip-off of? Munch invaders, right? So it's basically, it's inverse Pac-Man, where instead of... Pac-Man means light cycles.

Yeah, so instead of eating dots, you're laying down a trail. What are you munching, though? It's kind of like poop man, if you think. He still does this munching action for no reason other than it's a rip-off of Pac-Man. But as far as I know. So it's not munching at all. It's a rip-off of Pac-Man and K.C. Munchkin. That's a double rip-off.

Yeah. Don't bring up Casey Munchkin. But, yeah, you're laying down trails, and other than that, it's exactly Pac-Man. And then you have Ti Invaders, which is a straight-up space invaders club. It was good. It was fine. It's fun to play with the keyboard. Yeah, but, I mean, everyone made a Space Invaders clone. If you couldn't make it sound good Space Invaders clone, they needed to take you out back.

The joystick, I should point out, the joysticks on the TI sucked ass. I mean, they were horrible. They were like mudgy, clodgy little. It's like playing. There's like a stick with a big wide button. Yeah, one big red button. And neither, you know, it's two into one plug, two controllers plugged into one thing that goes in the back. So you could have two, but they just were horrible.

I mean, they just would break and they were not good. And it felt like, you know, like stirring frozen ice cream. That's a good analogy. And like I said, both of them with fairly short cables into a single plug. So basically two of you sitting on the floor right in front of the system is the only way you're going to. It was the windy's frosty controller. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

The button that doesn't do anything that it actually was. You can't eat it, though. That's the problem. They're pretty bad. Dip a french fry. So a lot of games are controlled with the keyboard by necessity. Because either you didn't have the joysticks or the joysticks broke or they were just... Yeah, I had the joysticks, but yeah, I think I resorted to the keyboard for some of the noise.

Yeah, I do remember a friend of mine who lived on the same block of me, had a TI and had the joysticks, which we didn't have at the computers at school. And I did not enjoy using the joysticks. Yeah. Nobody I know. I have like five pairs of those joysticks. I've never really used them. because they're just terrible. I mean, now, in fairness, some of the Atari joysticks were pretty bad, too.

They worked, though. I mean, they worked, depending on which brand you got. Yeah, not that. Yeah. Those weren't good. Anyways. But. So were there any other rip-off games on TI?

I mean, there were a lot of adaptations, like Hunt the Wumpus and things. Yeah, that's a separate category, though. But Hunt the Wompis is one of the great games of the TI, I would say. Yeah, it takes a classic graphic or a texted of the mainframe game. It ends up playing kind of like Mind Sweeper, in my opinion, because you've got a sort of grid-based system

and you're playing off clues about what are in the adjacent grid tiles around you to avoid the wumpus. And then you have to figure out, based on the clues of the wind and the bats and whatever of where to shoot your error to kill the wumpus eventually while avoiding him and stuff. Yeah, I mean, each round takes like a minute,

but, you know, it's challenging because you have to kind of infer through clues where the wampus is and try to avoid it killing you. Yeah, it's like working off imperfect information kind of game as you explore and try to try to make your best guess. And you're not going through a maze so much as like a kind of a grid that's got irregular connections. Yeah. And you're sort of figuring out the connections as you go. Yeah, it's a grid, but some of them are connected directly. Yeah, some of them are bent. I remember that.

...paths between diagonal grid bases, yeah. That's okay. And then at the very end, when you figure out where the one piece says, you let your arrow fly. Just like when you're fighting Gannon. Hope you got it right. Actually, there's another one I should have talked about where we're doing ones that are mostly just rip-offs

is video games one, which I think came with the system in a lot of the bundles. Oh, yeah? Which was just a cartridge that had three different games on it. And they were all super simple. They were kind of okay. one of them was pot shot, which was sort of halfway between duck hunt

and, like, hunting an Oregon trail. Carnival, right? Carnival, right? Yeah, or carnival, yeah. It's a shooting gallery game. But so you have, you have like bunnies on the top, which are slow, and then moose, and then ducks, which are fast,

and you get various points for them. I think a bunny is as faster than moose, but what do I know? Yeah. It's a really small moose. It's a little slow. And then there's a pinball game, which is actually kind of a weird.

combination of pong and breakout in that you have like these barriers at the top of the screen and you have a paddle at the bottom of the screen although there's also like drains beside it like pinball so you can lose no matter what every pinball machine has drains on it yeah so but you're trying to break through the things and you can get a higher score if you get into the thing behind the things but if you break them all then like extra barriers show up so it's got some weird mechanics going on it's a little slow but it's kind of interesting and then the other one on that cartridge is doodle which is really kind of terrible because it's basically on light cycles, only you're controlling spiders that move very slowly and trying to trap the

other spider in your trail, and it's really frustrating and not very good. Yeah, but somehow missed out of this, and it sounds like I didn't. No, you didn't miss a whole lot. I played it because it was what I had for a while before I bought some more games. It's that kind of thing. What about Parsec? Would you consider that a rip-off? It's very Defender-ish, without having all the substance.

I didn't actually own that one, but I've gone back and looked at it. Yeah, it looks like Defender, but it's basically just a size- I think you rescue people. You don't rescue people. So there's a few interesting. Scramble, really. Yes, scramble. There's a few interesting mechanics.

There's some sections apparently where you have to shoot down all the enemies, and otherwise they just keep wrapping around and coming back. And then there's also this fuel mechanic where you can run low on fuel and have to go very tunnel. Very scramble. And it has good speech synthesis. What is the, one of the things it says, like, alert, enemy craft advancing. or something like that. It's a female voice.

I don't think, oh, that's right. I do remember, yeah. Other enemy craft advancing. Yes, okay. But I think the thing about it is the way it's drawn, even though it's not actually vector graphics, it's grown in that style, which makes it look like Defender

and all those other vector games. And it has this kind of... Defender wasn't a vector either, but it did have that crisp look. But yeah, the line art look too. And it has this apparently like kind of randomized background that scrolls past It's a good game, though.

It's considered one of the best on this, I'm the platform. Today on Geffen Playhouse Unscripted, we are joined by actor, producer, director, author, What else can you do, Brian Cranston? I sweep floors. You do? And I load a dishwasher really, really well. Do you unload it? Not to remember.

Okay. We could give you a job in our house. The talent is loading it, not unloading. No, the talent is buying the dishes that fit together and not the dishes that I buy that don't fit in the dishwasher. Well, I could teach you how they can fit. Okay, Brian. Thank you. That's Brian Cranston on Geffen Playhouse Unscripted.

Be sure to listen on Podcast One or through the Podcast One app and Apple Podcasts. Hey, Retronauts listeners, I regret to announce that our current reality is boring. Instead of jumping on the back of a chocobo or into the cockpit of a wondrous airship whenever we want to go down to the local Trader Joe's, we have to rely on cars. Machines made of fiberglass and steel that run on liquefied dinosaur corpses. But if you're in the market for a new ride, consider turning to Truecar. With TrueCar, you can see what other people in your local market paid for the car you want. information that empowers you to feel confident. Once you register with TrueCar, you can connect with a certified local dealer and see real pricing on actual inventory.

And with over 13,000 certified True Car dealers nationwide, and over 3 million cars sold by True Car dealers, you can rest assured that True Car has a history of happy customers. So when you're ready to buy, visit True Car to enjoy a more confident car buying experience. Some features are not available in all states. I think you wanted to talk about alpiner. No, that wasn't me. That was someone else. Was that? Okay. We all wanted to talk about alpiner. There was a weird voice in my head. that said we should talk about alpiner so we should do that we share me talk about alpiner is

awesome i can talk about alpiner was great it was the first tia 99 for a game i ever played it was one of my first two like i have like five copies of it i don't know why everybody had it and um it it's just neat i mean you're climbing a mountain and you're avoiding pumas and i mean honestly i remember falling rocks i remember it being incredibly frustrating but still kind of great like you missed out on the speech synthesis too i did miss out on the speech synthesis i just had weird like beware falling objects but yeah so you're climbing up these mountains it has these mountains named after real mountains

Mount Hood and Everest and whatever Matterhorn it's kind of Matterhorn Matterhorn yes and it's kind of I mean in a way it reminds me the setup of ice climber just in that you're continually going up and things are mocking you back down it doesn't have like great ice climbing things

The mechanics are totally different Yeah it's probably more fun than ice climber Maybe probably I don't know how to describe what's special about it It has this feel to it Like, it's just really cool. Like, you're on an adventure. I mean, you're climbing a mountain.

You're trying to get as tall, you know, as high as you can on these tall, tall, real-world map graphics. It's miraculous, because how did someone who lived in Lubbock, Texas, know what it was like to be on a mountain? Yeah, they didn't have planes back then and stuff. I mean, one thing was the graphics seemed really impressive for the time, even if they're, they're pretty basic looking now. But you've had these huge sprites or what looked like sprites and were probably actually half background with small animated parts. But you had this character that was like, you know, Oh, yeah.

A quarter of the screen is huge. And you ran into like these pumas and these bears that were like, again, a quarter of the screen wide and like this little hands swiping out at you. It just like it looked really impressive compared to other video games at the time just to have all these big things to interact with. Yeah. The treaties are graphically detailed too. Yeah. And it had lots of really detailed.

And it had these risk reward things going on. Like the bear would have like a jewel like right next to its paw that would give you extra points. But it might smack you and knock you back down the mountain. And that was the frustrating part where every time you ran to things, you'd fall. farther and farther back down the mountain. I like the high-scored thing, too, where you could type in your name how high you got. Yeah, you got a high-rate. And you compete against yourself, I guess.

Sure. It showed what the highest mountain you got to. I don't think so. But it was just neat within a play session because it said, you know, binge Everest. Yeah, you got to Everest. I don't know if I ever got to Everett. I think Matterhorn was the first change. You know what did you find your name to Ben Jebred Everest.

Benj Everest. Benj Everest. That was my first name. I also really like just the cover art for this game because it's this like hapless, like old-timey mountain climber face-to-face with like this 10-foot grizzly bear. Just looking back towards the camera like, oh shit, not again. Like the illustrate it. Not again. This happens all the time. Apparently. I mean, it does. If you play this game, this happens all the time. You get knocked down the mountain by a grizzly bear. But it's great. So what else is there? There's tunnels of doom, which I would want to be an expert on, but I didn't really get to.

to play it. I saw it, but I've looked at it. I saw the older boys playing it, but I was too young at the time to be allowed to play a T&D game. So it's this interesting hybrid. I'm embarrassed because I bought a copy of it about 15 years ago and I never actually ran it. I hooked up my TIA. It was like in a closet. But it's a cartridge and a disc, and it's a dungeon crawler. Yeah. So it's this hybrid. You've got this first person dungeon crawling, like, you know, fantasy style, star, wizardry style. But then when you get in a battle, it goes to this tactical turn-based battle screen where you've got these sprites on a grid. So it's like both these things at once, which is not something that I've really seen anywhere else. So it's kind of like pool of radiance-ish. I never played any of those old D-D game, so I don't have that point of comparison. Like the Goldbach style where you kind of have, I mean, even Ultima did that to a degree. Okay. Yeah, I just, I don't have that background. So I haven't.

I feel like that's kind of forward thinking for, you know, a game of this. Yeah, for the time. It was really cool. It's highly regarded. You'd go in a closet and be in this different psalis. tunnels of doom and what about Chisholm Trail

I think I don't remember I can't remember Chish Trail I didn't have that one It's weird We don't know anything about Let's give it

So it looks so it looks So I want to talk about The one that looks like that That I did have in which was Tombstone City Yeah I get those two consoles a lot Yeah So I'm pretty sure they're very different games Were they developed in Texas

Yeah they were developed in Texas Yeah they were developed in Texas But they both have these top-down Top-down shooter grid-based Shooter kind of views I don't know too much about Cheslam Trail But Tombstone City is this weird hybrid So it has

So it's top down There's this section in the middle That's these like tombstones That you can hide out between And out and out and the rest is open And there's cactuses and tumbleweeds And the cactuses spawn morgues Because it's Tombstone City in the 21st century

So there's aliens trying to take over I don't know why they're spawned by cactuses Cactus marks But you have this It's like the western version of Hanyonkyo alien Kind of that And there's also this centipede element to it Because you shoot...

I have to say that every other thing. Hayakio alien is a great thing to say. I said a record as the white man who said Hayankio alien most... So you shoot these morgue aliens and they turn into cactuses for some reason. But if you end up with two cactuses in adjacent spaces, they spawn more morg.

So you have to be very careful about where and when you shoot these things. And morgues are spelled M-O-R-G-S. We're not talking about a place where they prepare a gay body. This is just a weird name for an alien. Okay. So you have to be like strategic. about where you shoot these things, and you only get rid of the generators if you shoot them right as they're generating. But you can also, like, very easily inadvertently create more

generators by shooting them in the wrong place. And you can also, like, trap yourself in your safety zone by blocking your exits. It's a really big version of gauntlet. It's like a weird, it's just the generator thing. It's like some gauntlet and some centipede and a whole bunch of things matched together. And it's actually kind of cool because there's actually kind of ends up being a bunch of strategy to it. Although then in the end, you know, it's an arcade game and things just get faster until you die. But, That's just like life. Yeah.

So someone put out of here that there was a Scott Adams Adventure cartridge on the system? Oh, yeah. That I didn't have. It's called Adventure. There's a cartridge called Adventure. And it's like, I think by itself, it either doesn't work or it just plays the pirate adventure, like the first Scott Adams Adventure. And it's really neat because it's, you know, a single screen graphical adventure, text adventure, where you see a picture and you type in two word commands, like get. lamp, you know, move, rogue, you know.

Punch Hulk. I guess it's not one of those scott items games. So is this another one where you can add in? I think you can load from disc or cassette, maybe cassette, different adventures. So it must have the engine or the parser or whatever on the cartridge. Yeah, I think that's the way it works. And Ben, I know you wanted to talk about Music Maker. That was, I added that one.

I had that. Ben, sorry. Yeah, someone's got to get a different thing. Yeah. So that was one. add, because I had that. Just call me Everest from now on. Everest. I'll be caring if you want to.

Anyways, so Music Maker is basically like the music module of Mario Paint. It's a little graphical tracker. It doesn't have fun icons like Mario Paint. It just has actual notes. But it's basically you use, you know, the, you can use the joystick if you hate yourself. But you use whatever input method to actually just literally drag and drop notes onto stabs. And it's just this cute little tracker. There's nothing too fancy about it, but that was something that, you know, pre-having Macs and having Mario paint.

That was something that you couldn't really do anywhere else. So it's just cool to have that as a cartridge. You can write your own songs. Ti Home Accountant, which was an exciting spreadsheet simulator. Oh, yeah. I loved that game. It was so fun. Yeah.

Did you ever balance your checkbook on it and try to do, like, make the most money? I'm pretty sure my dad was still balancing our checkbook on the Osborne at this month. It was neat that there were a lot of application. you know, utilities and stuff on cartridge on the TI, many more than other platforms, you know, word processors. Well, and do we want to talk about how you could write and save your own stuff? Sure, absolutely. So the other thing about TI is it came with TI Basic, which as Bench said, was interpreted,

so it was incredibly slow. But it was basically a full-featured basic language system, and you could just write your own programs. And then if you had the, like, audio cassette adapter, you could save your code out onto audio cassette and play it in your walkman if you wanted to hurt your ears with static. Nobody did that. No. But yeah, and so they would, and people would also put out these, these books. So this was the thing that happened in the late 80s, is you could get these whole books of

type it in yourself basic programs. And so I had like a space themed one and a monster themed one and a weird stuff themed one. And they were all like super simple things because, you know, 40 lines of basic is about all you're going to want to type in off a page and that can only get you so much. But they would do cute little things like print out neat patterns or, you know, let you type in your name and put it back to you in a different context and that sort of stuff. Or like convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. Yeah, sure. Yeah, you could do that. That was a whole program back then. Yep. So are there any other games worth talking about?

Probably. I see Hangman and Car Wars. I don't know anything about either of those games. Hangman is this weird, like, rumored to be about a guy with letters and, like, news. Is it based on the Lens Eppelin song? Yeah, Hangman. Yeah, that one. The one where you can't get silver.

or gold. Yeah, you can't get... Nothing to keep you from the Ellis Bowl. Yeah, Jimmy Page shows up and he tries to hang you. I think we've hit most of the high points from the pre, from the era before people started doing ports.

Okay. So there is one thing I want to ask you guys about, and I wasn't able to find much info about this, and I don't know if I just, like, read a site that was completely lying about it, but the MBX. I have one. What the, it's like, it's crazy. Apparently, it's,

it was, like, going to be a Milton Bradley game console, and Milton Bradley decided, oh, no, we can't compete. So they turned it into like an add-on peripheral for the TI? Yeah. And I think they approached somebody else first about like Atari or something. This is like the opposite trajectory of the Sony PlayStation. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's got this weird touchscreen thing that's not a screen.

It's a touch panel surface where you can insert overlays. And it has this interesting joystick that's analog. Kind of like the television controller, but bigger? The what? The Intellivision. Television, yeah, kind of. I mean, if you think about slipping in, over on an television controller,

but it's like the size of a book, like a textbook or something, you know. And also, there's a big joystick with a trigger button on the front that you hold in your hand. It has like a grip, like a gun, and you have a trigger. Yeah, like a pistol controller. Three buttons on the back.

And an analog joystick that also rotates at the top, like a... Oh, yeah, like Akari Warriors in the arcade, where it was a stick and then it had the rotating... Poor man's... Backball kind of thing where you just spin. Yeah. And also, there are other earlier consoles that played with that concept. Yeah, there wasn't a tristan controller.

But also, but the neat thing with the speech recognition, supposedly, it had this headset that didn't have speakers, but just had a microphone. But you put it on over your head like a headset and you could shout into it and then say like, you know, move or something. I don't remember. Huh. And it would, was it better than recognizing your speech than lifeline for a place? I think no. I think it didn't really recognize speech. It just recognized sound and the intensity of the sound. So whatever you shout it, you could just say biscuits or Everest or whatever, and things would happen. And I know there was a cool baseball game for it. I think the reason why I never used it is I have a boxed MBX with all the stuff, but I don't know if I have any cartridges that work with it. And if I did, I haven't set up my T-I-99 in a while other than I did write an article about it for PC World last year. It was neat. I mean, it's an interesting thing. I think Milton Bradley licensed the controller as the space age controller to Atari later in the 80s,

but it didn't have the analog and it didn't have the knob or something like that. But it was a similar shape and it didn't have as many buttons. Okay, so that wasn't just something someone made up. It actually exists. I have one. But it was only sold, according to the site that I read, it was sold for like two months. Yeah. It was, like, super, super rare.

So maybe the thing I have is worth something. I have no idea. I should look at it. I mean, I bought it, you know, in the 90s or something on eBay. It's in the box. Yeah, I looked up $3,000. I looked up TI pricing before this episode, and the systems sell for nothing. The computers are cheap.

Yeah. But add-on to the peripherals are like hundreds and hundreds of dollars. They're extremely expensive. The peripheral expansion box is highly coveted and rare and, you know, hard to get. It's coveted and rare? Coveted among computer collectors. Rare, yeah, because it was expensive. I mean, it's not like, like I said, you know, I've over the years accidentally collected like five TI994A's in the box.

Everybody kept them in the box probably because they just played them and put them back. That's how you know it wasn't very popular. I have a lot of things like that. Yeah, and then there's also the later gray versions that after like 83 or something, they did a lower cost model of the TI994. I did not know that. That's plastic, all gray plastic. Was the audio cassette drive work than anything? Because that's what I've got.

I don't think so. But you could use any cassette drive, cassette player with it. Can you just plug it in on? Yeah. You know, they had three jacks, like, in-out, and whatever controls the motor on and off kind of thing, whatever that's called. So it works with like a Radio Shack cassette drive.

I didn't know. So are there any of the, the later licensed, I guess, games that you guys want to talk about? I have moved on to Macintosh gaming by that point, and Nintendo. All I know is I have some of those cartridges, like we mentioned.

There were Sega, some sagas. There was a bunch of stuff that existed later on. I think there may have only been one Atari Soft Port Defender or something. I know I saw there was a rarity list we looked at. I'm going to read some letters because we actually got more letters about TI than Mac. I was totally surprised. Well, people really seemed to have memories. It was inexpensive.

So this is from So this is from Claybot In the early 80s my schoolyard Chum Ross had a T-I And around that time, we were playing with doing rudimentary programming over elementary school's Apple II computer Ross was fortunate enough to have a T-I at his house so naturally we started trying to figure out

how to hack around with the TI I knew a bit more about the workings of Apple so I mostly spectated provided design ideas when Ross would mess with the TI programming. I recall trying to make very simplistic choose-your-own-adventure games. My most definite memory of the system was Ross explaining to me

that we needed to save our games and programs on a cassette tape, a fact that blew my mind and simultaneously, even at that young age, struck me as a bad way to run software. Ross sounds like a cool guy. From Tom Hewlett, my friend had a TI growing up,

and I remember it fondly. The games were better in general than what my family had on Atari, but obviously far below the NES, the same friend would get soon after, instantly relegating his TI library to the garage. Standouts include Parsik, a Gradiah-style shooter that required you to navigate a tight corridor to refuel, and Tombstone City,

a cool little twist on Centipede where defeated aliens became tombstones that helped shield you from attack but could impede movement. I'm always curious to revisit these Black Sheep games, but maybe they're better left in my memory. memories. Their shortcomings forgotten. If I ever design a space shooter, though, look forward to refueling. It's okay to like whatever you grew up with. I'm just going to say that.

Oh, here we go from Jess Reagan. First, I think it's worth mentioning the celebrity endorsements that computers of the early 80s had gotten. Uh-oh. William Shadner for the Commodore Vic 20, Alan Alda for the Atari Excel series, the late Charlie Chaplin for IBM, and somewhat dubiously, Bill Cosby for the T.I.99.4A. Second, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed in the kinds of games available for the T.I.99.4.A. Sure, there were plenty of twitchy action titles, but games like The Alien and Chisholm Trail always seemed off.

They were a little too slow, a little too stiff, a little too awkwardly designed. What would you have done to improve them? Maybe you... Make them a little more responsive. That's a question for a certified... computer game designer. The TI was not a

graphics-based system. It was a character-based system, right? So you kind of had to... Essentially, yeah. Yeah, you really had to... You know, Alpiner had a bunch of character graphics that were all assembled together, like blocks. I don't know how...

Yeah, it was all built. It was all built on blocks. I mean, they could have gotten some great licenses, licensed games. I mean, there were some later, but it was probably too late, as we mentioned, you know. Yeah, I mean, I was just looking up on those. He's looking at the cartridge. Yeah, I was just looking up on here. Up in, like, A384,

you've got things like Digdug and Donkey Kong and stuff showing up. So it's yesterday's games tomorrow. Yep. And finally, one last letter from Jeff Krebsbach. Let's see. Two thoughts on the TI 99-4A. Bill Cosby was a thousand times cooler

as a spokesman than George Plimpton. Current events, notwithstanding. That's speech synthesis box. I haven't heard it in years, and it probably hasn't aged well. but back in the day, it was so cool. Nice shooting, Captain. Oh, and the poor man's Pac-Man.

Yeah, Munch Man wasn't fooling anyone. Thanks for spending time on the also-ran B-tier consoles. We were young and naive back then, and we didn't know any better. You're welcome. We should talk about Bill Cosby because how he ruined all of our childhoods and everything, and he was the spokesman. And I used to love, also, I had like a small cottage industry for years,

you know, posting scans of wonderful celebrity endorsements and everything, and now everything I did about Bill Cosby is, like, uh... Toxic? I just got a, yeah, toxa. So I've been, I've had requests from editors to remove him from slideshows and leave all that behind us. I don't mind. I mean, he's like a monster.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. I mean, he's part of history, but, yeah, he's, he's, that's not good entertainment history. All right, let's cleanse our palette with one last letter after all. From Kevin Bunch. The T.I.994A was the first home computer we ever had, albeit briefly. My parents picked it up from an elementary. school computer lab that was replacing their TIs with Apple twos in the late 80s, so naturally

every game we had for it was an educational title. There were some decent ones, too. I have vague memories of some arithmetic and spelling games where you'd get a canned animation for each correct answer. The best was a centipede-esque basic math game that I admittedly couldn't do much in since this was before I'd learned multiplication and division. We ended up swapping the TI99 for a for a Commodore 64 after maybe a year, and the rest of my family practically forgot we ever had it. As a first glimpse of the computer age, though, it's left an indelible mark in my memories. So I actually had one of these incredibly generic math games. I had a cartridge named Addison Wesley Math Game 6, which is about as exciting as it sounds,

I'm pretty sure my parents made me get that along. That's the one with the Russian boxer guy. This is actually the one with baseball in it, which is weird. It has a baseball game that looks like one of the old NES baseball things, only instead of actually playing baseball, you answer math problems and people run around bases. That sounds very disappointing. Yeah, yeah. Baseball math.

Is that all the letters you got? Five, four? There was one or two more, but we need to wrap this up. Okay. Yeah. So we'll call today. But, yeah, any final thoughts on the T.I.99.4A. Alpineer and Tombstone were actually kind of fun.

That's about what I can say for it. It's worth it just to play alpiner. I'd say get one. Just to play alpiner. Hear the cool music. It goes, dun-da-da-da-da-da. It's this famous, like, European. Oh, yeah.

A bunch of them all had, like, classical music that, you know, it was in the public domain. Like a polka or something. It was neat. It was a neat. And the speech synthesis. Synthesis. Synthesis. It was cool.

Even if I didn't have it. I can be jealous of it. Yeah, it was cool. All right. That's all we guys see. So, yeah, I guess that wraps it up for TI99-4A. We managed to talk about it for 45 minutes, which honestly is a lot more than I thought we were going to get out of this topic. So congratulations us.

Thanks, everyone who wrote in. Yeah, even though this is a pretty obscure and more or less forgotten system, as Binge said, because, you know, the price cuts were so dramatic that it did eventually kind of reach a certain saturation. I think they sold about 3 million units total over time. So, yeah, there's pretty good odds. It's like one in a hundred chance that someone living in America would have owned one. So, you know, 1% of us. Why not? I have those people.

Good. These are the good ones. one percentage. Yeah, the good ones. The TI 99.41%. Well, we try. The ones who are willing to pay $49 for a computer. Yeah, TI didn't make very good profits on this machine. No, they didn't. That division got shut down. That's why Commodore crushed them. It's kind of sad. But they still make good calculators. So that's great. Anyway, for Retronauts, this has been Jeremy Parrish. Ben Jedg. Ben Elgin. And you can, of course, find Retronauts at Retronauts.com on iTunes.

and on the podcast one network. Retronauts continues to be supported through Patreon, patreon.com slash retronauts. So please help us out. Keep the lights on. Keep me fed. It's very important. I need to eat.

Not a lot. I don't ask for a lot. Just enough to sustain myself. Gin budget. What's that? The gin budget. Yeah, I got to feed these guys. The gin budget.

Got to keep them drunk for the podcast. On Twitter, you can find me personally as GameSpite. And, yeah, you can. check out my YouTube videos and stuff like that. Whatever you want. Anyway, guys, tell us about yourselves. Benjedwards.com. Vintagecom.

You can find me on Twitter at Benjedwards with no space in the middle. And Ben. I'm still on Twitter at Kieran with 2N, so that's K-I-R-I-N, on Twitter. And I'm also starting a sort of retro Tumblr where I may post some pictures of my T-I and some other stuff that I found in my closets.

It's called Kieran's Retrocloset.tumbler.com, only one end this time, sorry. Seems like an unwieldy URL. Yeah, well, you know, Tumblr names. You've got to come up with something that's not already being used. Fair enough. That's fun. All right. So that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts Micro.

Bob will be back in two weeks with his own episode of Retronauts Micro. I don't know what it'll be. And there will be another one from me two weeks after that. It's like, you know, biweekly cycle or something. Pretty crazy. So thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting us and enjoy the rest of your day, night, whatever the hell time you're listening to this. Thanks. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General.

Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do.

The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.