
Why is my TI-99/4A in Black and White? - fogus
http://www.pagetable.com/?p=672
======
jaysonelliot
Taking the time to isolate the problem and repair the crystal on a 30-year-old
computer, when you could as easily have used an emulator or picked up another
one on eBay, just because it's more fun to fix it yourself - that's pretty
much the definition of a hacker, right there.

------
Zarathust
"I’m no expert but that looks like a horizontal sync pulse followed by a
colorburst to me. But there was still no color on the TV."

You're an expert

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yoshamano
Its funny seeing an article on the 99/4A here on HN :)

I'm too young to have had any experience with the home computer generation. A
friend of mine, however, cut his teeth on the 99/4A, and he still has a soft
spot for it. So much so that his first big project he ever did with an FPGA
was to recreate and expand upon the TMS9918A video chip. He finished it a year
or so ago and if anyone is interested in reading about it he documented the
whole thing on his site <http://codehackcreate.com/archives/30>

~~~
ams6110
The CPU in the 99/4A was interesting. It didn't have registers. It had a
"workspace pointer" that pointed to a space in RAM where your "register" slots
were. So you could have multiple "workspaces" (sets of registers) and switch
among them by simply setting the workspace pointer. Instant new context. Much
slower than real registers of course but also quite flexible.

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smoyer
I have a TI-99/4A somewhere (perhaps in my in-law's basement) and I'm really
tempted to dig it out. My first computer was a heavily modified ZX-81, but my
first computer with a real keyboard was the TI. Both were amazing platforms
for learning, and really the only downside was the use of a cassette recorder
for storage. Anyway ... thanks for bringing back some great memories.

As an aside, the inductor isn't so much used to "tune" the frequency of the
crystal as it is to make sure the crystal's impedance is matched properly. You
can "pull" a crystal's frequency slightly, but you'll also notice the
amplitude of the waveform drops significantly as you move away from it's
natural resonance.

~~~
ams6110
You could get a floppy disk as an add-on (a whopping 90K .. single density
5.25").

I had one back when I was a kid. Learned BASIC of course, and assembly
language. There was a little plug-in cartridge called the "Mini Memory" that
provided an extra 4K of RAM and an assembler.

The keyboard was small so a lot of the punctuation was accessed with the "FN"
modifier key, unfortunately FN-= was an immediate hard reset which was all too
easy to hit accidentally. More than once lost a lot of code that way. Taught
me to save frequently.

I seem to recall there was some hack (POKE a value into a specific address?)
that would disable that....

~~~
nsxwolf
Don't forget the other cool thing about Mini Memory - it has a lithium battery
to save your programs in that 4K. It's almost like a tiny SSD!

~~~
ams6110
Yeah I did forget about that... as long as your program was less than 4K!

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cavemangeek
Wow this brings back some memories! My first computer was also a TI 99/4A. I
got mine brand new in 1982 through a friend that worked at TI. For a while I
suffered through the slowness of using a tape recorder for storage but
eventually I bought the expansion box for it which added memory and a 160K,
single-sided, 5.25" floppy disk. Compared to the tape drive it was a speed
demon!

Ahhhh .. the "good old days" of buying a computer magazine with programs
listed in Basic and typing them all in. Sometimes having to figure out how to
convert them because the version of Basic wasn't the same one. I don't have
the 99/4A anymore but I do still have a book that I bought back then to
experiment with called, "Projects in Machine Intelligence for Your Home
Computer".

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sdfjkl
Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.p...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.pagetable.com%2F%3Fp%3D672&oq=cache%3Awww.pagetable.com%2F%3Fp%3D672)

~~~
lucb1e
Another Wordpress blog down by the slightest bit of traffic. They really need
to do something about performance...

~~~
jemka
Cheap/misconfigured hosting will cripple any CMS.

~~~
jrockway
The error is always "error opening database connection". You should not open
any database connection to send back a static block of HTML.

~~~
jemka
>The error is always "error opening database connection". You should not open
any database connection to send back a static block of HTML.

What? The message indicates an error connecting to MySQL. WordPress (a CMS)
uses MySQL to store its content. If it cannot fetch that content from the DB,
you see an error. What were you expecting?

~~~
jrockway
I was expecting the page to be cached in RAM. Assembling a page from a
database for every request is wasteful of limited computing resources. And
doesn't work, as the error message mentions.

~~~
jemka
This isn't a limitation of WordPress. It's a limitation in the stack.

The average WordPress (or any other CMS for that matter) stack doesn't serve
pages from RAM.

And even if it did, it could expire, it could be updated, it could become
corrupt, the caching server could go down, or have a number of other things go
wrong. There would be a call to the DB, the DB could fail and there would
STILL be a static html page returned providing information on the error.

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nobleach
I was in a demo the other day where the presenter mentioned "making Mr.
Bojangles dance". Immediately I knew exactly where he got it. I asked anyway,
he said, "well my first computer was a TI-99/4A". I was ecstatic! So was mine.

~~~
nsxwolf
Oh, wow. Mr. Bojangles was my very first exposure to programming computer
graphics and animation.

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protomyth
We had one of those at my high school with the floppy (huge friggin box) and
the voice synthesizer. I programmed the thing to say Dakota Sioux (different
than Lakota) words[1]. It was quite the toy. Got replaced with a lab of Apple
IIe's, but no more speech.

1) trivia: Dakota also has different pronunciation / words depending if a male
or female is speaking

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ErikRogneby
This reminds me of a time when the 6.5536mhz crystal was perennially out of
stock at radio shack because because of an easy tone dialer hack to make a
redbox.

~~~
nsxwolf
I remember scoring a 6.49mhz crystal around that time, and feeling pretty
elite.

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rwmj
Anyone hazard a guess why crystals go "bad"? I thought they were completely
solid-state devices.

~~~
sdfjkl
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator#Stability_an...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator#Stability_and_aging)

 _Crystals undergo slow gradual change of frequency with time, known as aging.
There are many mechanisms involved. The mounting and contacts may undergo
relief of the built-in stresses. Molecules of contamination either from the
residual atmosphere, outgassed from the crystal, electrodes or packaging
materials, or introduced during sealing the housing can be adsorbed on the
crystal surface, changing its mass; this effect is exploited in quartz crystal
microbalances. The composition of the crystal can be gradually altered by
outgassing, diffusion of atoms of impurities or migrating from the electrodes,
or the lattice can be damaged by radiation. Slow chemical reactions may occur
on or in the crystal, or on the inner surfaces of the enclosure. Electrode
material, e.g. chromium or aluminium, can react with the crystal, creating
layers of metal oxide and silicon; these interface layers can undergo changes
in time. The pressure in the enclosure can change due to varying atmospheric
pressure, temperature, leaks, or outgassing of the materials inside. Factors
outside of the crystal itself are e.g. aging of the oscillator circuitry (and
e.g. change of capacitances), and drift of parameters of the crystal oven.
External atmosphere composition can also influence the aging; hydrogen can
diffuse through nickel housing. Helium can cause similar issues when it
diffuses through glass enclosures of rubidium standards._

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Aloisius
My first computer was also a TI-99/4a which was bought for me in 1983 when I
was 4. I have many fond memories of that computer.

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a_p
TI finally launched a color version of the TI-84. It's called the TI-84 Plus C
Silver Edition; it comes out in Spring 2013[1].

EDIT: This does seem to be off topic. I posted before I read the article (a
cardinal sin, I admit) because I could not connect to the site. A second
attempt to load the page took about 5 full minutes.

[1]<http://education.ti.com/calculators/products/US/ti-84c/>

~~~
mariuolo
What has a calculator to do with a home computer from the 80s?

~~~
jrockway
The article is down, and TI used a model number in the same series as their
massively-popular handheld calculator line. People are probably thinking the
article is complaining about the primitive screens that the calculators have.

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zipop
Site is: 10 Call Clear

~~~
derleth
Site is: Being hosted on aforementioned TI-99/4A

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monsterix
Site down?

Edit: Up, for me now.

~~~
nsxwolf
Down for me. As a TI-99/4A enthusiast I am quite anxious to read this!

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Spooky23
My question would be: If you have a computer capable of posting something on
the internet, why are you thinking about your TI-99?

~~~
nsxwolf
Because they're cool. And they can play Parsec:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec_(video_game)>

~~~
T-hawk
Major TI-99/4A fan here too. Parsec was the awesomest shootemup of its time by
leaps and bounds. Pixel perfect movement and collision detection. I got good
enough to roll over the scoreboard. <http://dos486.com/misc/parsec.jpg>

The manual claims the sequence of level colors recycles after 16, but that's
incorrect. Every level from about 13 to as far as I've reached somewhere
beyond 20 is bright yellow. The manual also claims the game keeps getting
harder indefinitely, but that's not true either, nothing really changes past
level 4. The only difference is that the asteriod belt continues to lengthen
each level, but that's generally a good thing as it's worth so many points.

(Yeah, asteriod belt. Parsec misspells it. Blew me away that I played the game
for ten-plus years before I ever noticed.)

Awesomely, Texas Instruments released a number of TI-99 cartridge images as
freeware. They're included with several emulator distributions. So you can
legally and easily play Parsec and TI Invaders and a couple dozen other TI
games. [http://www.harmlesslion.com/cgi-
bin/showprog.cgi?search=Clas...](http://www.harmlesslion.com/cgi-
bin/showprog.cgi?search=Classic99)

~~~
rbanffy
> Yeah, asteriod belt

One day in a distant future, a weakly godlike posthuman entity may want to
call a feature of its own stellar system The Asteriod Belt. Other posthuman
entities will, immediately recognize a fellow TI-99/4A enthusiast and start to
play games together.

:-)

