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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

My parents got one of these when I was 7... It was a TI/994A, actually. I have fond memories of playing Parsec on it! I also taught myself Basic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec_(video_game)

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I shudder to think how many hours I spent on that game. But even that paled in comparison to Tunnels of Doom.

http://ridingthecrest.com/edburns/classic-gaming/tunnels/

I wasted an alarmingly large percentage of a year or thereabouts on that game. And that was depite having the expansion chassis, floppy drives, the assembler card and Advanced Basic (all of which also ate a huge chunk of time).

i think TI basic was much easier than comodore basic; (still it really needed that extension cartridge)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_BASIC_(TI_99/4A)

Also it turns out that the interpreter was slow because it was written in an interpreted language, but it was good enough for simple games because they had built-in sprites.

Interesting that they have emulators/simulators for it.

http://www.99er.net/emul.shtml http://www.99er.net/win994a.shtml

No idea if this is true, but the meme was that you could only write BASIC for the TI99, assembly was forbidden somehow. For the most part, hackers avoided this system like the plague, despite all the advertisements starring Bill Cosby.

100% not true. There was an editor/assembler cartridge that let you program in ASM.

It had very little adoption and mindshare, though. All the assembly hackers were on the C-64, Apple II, and a bit later the PC.

Your other option was the Mini Memory cartridge, which added a scaled down version of Editor/Assembler as well as 8K of RAM and a battery backup.

It was an economical way to dabble in assembly without springing for the 32K RAM expansion and disk system.

I too started on TI BASIC, which taught me a lot, including ASCII, hex, binary, function calls, debugging the lists from magazines and how to type. I think I could type 'Call CLear' faster than anyone I knew! It's a pity I didn't get into ASM until years later when I got a spectrum.

I also had a TI99-4A ... It was a lot of fun to play with but I was also programming uProcessors in assembly language and that CPU's instruction set (and caveats) were so non-standard it was like learning it all over again.

I got good enough at Parsec to go infinite (earn lives faster than losing them) and roll over the score: http://dos486.com/misc/parsec.jpg

Fun fact: even though the manual says the sequence of level colors repeats after 16, it doesn't. It just stays yellow from level 16 onwards, through at least level 24 or so.

And Parsec doesn't run on the original /4, due to its version of the TMS9918 graphics chip not having the bitmap mode.

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