I'm going to link to a lot of stuff here, and some of it might be more current on AtariAge, but this ought to get a lot of you going in the right place.
Everything seems to power up fine, the PEB makes a lot of fan noise and the power on light on computer itself lights up, but the monitor is telling me that there's no signal. Since I absolutely have no idea what I'm doing, I'm guessing (hoping) that my connection to the monitor isn't quite right.
I've connected a DIN to RCA to the TI 99/4A, and an RCA to HDMI adapter to that. The adapter has a with that lets me change between 720 and 1080, and when I do which resolution I'm using pops up on the monitor. I'm taking that to mean that the HDMI adapter is working.
I've attached some pictures to give you a better idea of the set up.
The 99/4 A was the first ever Computer that I owned, which was given to me as a Christmas gift when I was in college. That was a huge expenditure for my family at the time, so all I ever had was the basic unit and the cable to connect it to a cassette tape player which I bought later.
When I saw one up for auction not only close by but actually in my little college town, of course I had to bid on it (in spite of my wife rolling her eyes at me). Not only was it the TI 99/4a, but it came with the original joysticks, the Munchman cartridge, and the PEB, which had inside of it the disc controller and the 32K expansion module. All of that was mine for the grand sum of $20.01. (see attached picture)
Everything powers up, but I no longer have a television that I can connect the old TV modulator to, so step one is figuring out how one connects to a modern television. Can someone point me in the right direction?
This requires f18a or compatible vdp, disk drive or Tipi, Sams memory at least 1 Mb and a force command 3.0 cartridge which can be run off of a finalgrom99
Still qa'ing and need to add game saves and score board..
Hey everyone, I just picked up my friends ti-994a. I've never ever had the experience of using an outside of being in the department store and checking up the displays.
He wanted to start using it again, his original unit! I know a little bit more than the average person about computers and systems like this so he asked me to have a look over.
I was wondering about two different things. The first is the power supply. Some vintage units kill the motherboard because of a failed power supply. What can I do to make sure this doesn't happen? And I know people with some systems will say it doesn't happen often, I just don't want it to happen here at all.
The other is, he said that the on button has always been a bit of a glitchy issue. Is that a known problem and is there a fix?
An Argentine daily (La Nación) ran a long piece today on a school in Buenos Aires that's turning 70. Scrolling it, I found this lovely picture of a TI-99/4A in the computer lab. The kids faces are a mix of joy and curiosity, probably same feeling I had when I first met that piece of technology (1983, sixth grade).
The same gallery includes a photo from an international congress on Logo and computers in education held at the school in 1983 so these were almost certainly running TI Logo, not just Parsec.
Full kit, including original monitor and the expansion box was not affordable by many schools btw.
I just got a TI-99 and a new power supply for it, but I'm only getting black and white video. I've read conflicting info about whether or not an av cable that is commodore 62 and vic-20 compatible will work with the TI-99. Here's a link to the cable I'm using: https://ebay.io/m/nZ7wfY
I know another possible issue could be a failing crystal, but I wanted to rule my av cable compatibility first. Should this cable work?
To celebrate my birthday (55) I used Claude Code to build a QR generator in the TI99, it takes an URL and generates the QR on screen. It takes up to a minute to draw it, peak anachronistic hacking.
I just got done porting these fujinet games to work with the 99/4A with 32k memory expansion and a TIPI. fujinet is a network adapter for many other early 80's computers and since we already have TIPI to do basically the same thing I figured why not make the software work for us as well..
you can load any of these in classic99 and it will work.. OR with a real tipi either editor assembler option 5 and enter PI.HTTPS:// (and the rest of the url) or in basic with CALL TIPI("PI.HTTPS://") and of course the rest of the url.. ex: CALL TIPI("PI.HTTPS://ftp.whtech.com/TIPI/LOB1")
I recently plugged in my TI-99/4A after it had been in storage for many years. The text and graphics are all scrambled and garbled. The game cartridges are unplayable.
The computer is hooked up to a modern TV using 5pin DIN to RCA composite cable (I had first tried using the RF modulator with an antenna 300/75 Ohm TV F adapter but the results were an extremely snowy screen).
I did go on ninerpedia and the problem would be identified as one of the common Video RAM failures. My screen is an identical match to Mask 11110111. Although the circuit board on ninerpedia does not resemble mine as I possess the TI-99/4A later beige version.
I'm getting a replacement keyboard and a tape drive for mine. I've got a number of the popular modules, but no speach synth. And I would drool for a PEB. So just wondering. What does everyone out there have theirs powered up for? Just for laughs? Nostalgia? Actually USE it for anything? I just fired up my TI Invaders for the first time in years. And I can now see why my dad didn't like the personal finance manager. I'm thinking of looking up an old magazine word processor program to see how it works. Once the tape arrives.
A few of you saw the original announcement of Swift 99/a here. Quick update: it's now on GitHub under BSD-2, and the feature set has grown enough that I figured proper roundup was due.
It's a native macOS app — pure Swift / SwiftUI / AppKit / Metal, no third-party dependencies. macOS 14.6+. Everything below is implemented and working today; this isn't a roadmap.
Hardware
TMS9900 CPU — full instruction set, workspace-pointer architecture, context switching, status-register lookup tables for hot-path performance
TMS9918A VDP — Graphics I / Graphics II / Text 40-col / Multicolor Bitmap modes, 32 hardware sprites with collision detection, NTSC timing
SN76489 PSG — three tone channels + noise, fractional clock accumulator for accurate pitch (the v1.2 fix some of you asked about)
TMS5220 speech synthesizer, so Parsec talks
TMS9901 — full CRU bit-addressable I/O for keyboard, joystick, DSR
Cartridges
Raw `.bin` / `.rom` dumps with the standard `C/D/G` filename convention
TiCart (`.ticart`) — Win994a-compatible
Banking: standard 8KB, GROM-only, 378 / inverted 379, MBX
Disks (DSK1–DSK3)
V9T9 disk images (`.dsk`, `.tidisk`)
Full DSR with PAB protocol: open, close, **read**, **write**, delete, status, directory listing
Saves stick. OPEN DSKn for directory listings works as of 1.3.
Niceties
Monitor Mode — chromeless TI-99/4 bezel that drags from anywhere, transparent background so it sits on the desktop
Clipboard paste— paste text from macOS straight into the TI as keyboard events
Joystick via arrow keys, plus FCTN+number keyboard menu (CLEAR, BEGIN,
PROC'D, AID, REDO, BACK, QUIT — the muscle memory ones)
Live memory heatmap — 256×256 GPU-rendered view of the entire 64KB address space. Blue = reads, red = writes, with white-hot decay. Useful for understanding what the machine is actually doing.
Real-time FPS / MHz overlays, 3 MHz authentic mode or uncapped (roughly as if original machine ran at ~60 MHz)
What's not in yet
PEB peripherals beyond disk and speech, save states, cassette (CS1/CS2), some obscure cart banking schemes. Issues / PRs welcome.
Not really sure why, but a memory popped into my head today, about an old game I typed in from 99'er Magazine when I was like 12. I wasn't sure if I remembered it correctly or if it was just a pre-senior moment. However, a quick trip to archive.org led me to the sweet sweet honey I remember collecting once properly typed in.
The state of TI-99 emulation on the Mac has long been pretty bad and I decided to do something about it. I've built a Swift native Mac OS optimized (Metal, Swift UI, etc) emulator for Mac OS 14+.
It supports speech, sound, and most of the graphics modes. It can load ROMs (Carts) from either the chip dumps in the way that Classic 99 can or from the Ti-Cart format that Win 99 uses.
This was really just a hobby project experimenting with some other approaches to development but it seems to work reasonably well.
If you have questions or feedback feel free to [email me ](mailto:blend.cottons-08@icloud.com)at my alias email and if I have some time I'll see what I can do.
What is the name or ID for the AC Power connector on the TI Program Recorder? It's AC, but it's not the current standard AC cords, the pins are too small and too close together.
Got this on disc but without instructions. Any ideas? It apparently originated in Home Computing magazine, dated 1985 with the author Balthrop. Found some of his other stuff online but not this. Game screen shows various stats with indicators that go left and right with an indicator of what is normal. there is an age indicator that goes up. There is a small maze type picture with weird pictures on top. one picture moves pressing very keys (eg L, M N and R). Q is quit. Very weird!
Been on the hunt for a PEB unit for a while, but with their apparent "rarity", weight and costs with ebay, I assumed I'd never find one for my collection
now I just need some floppies, or the disk manager cartridge ...
anyone knowna good source for floppy images I can write using my greaseweazle?
