23 Feb
2014
23 Feb
'14
4:31 p.m.
(discussion so far...)
Good comments guys. I'm learning a lot (not that I can understand all of
it, but you know what I mean).
I read somewhere that TI wasn't very forthcoming about giving users a lot
of technical information on the hardware for hardware/software hackers
(hackers in the original sense of the word) to make their machine sing.
This in contrast to, say, Apple with the Apple II. Is this a fair comment?
Someone in another forum I inhabit mentioned the fact that the TI BASIC
doesn't have any PEEKS or POKE commands to allow manipulation at a lower
level than BASIC allows. I checked and sure enough they are right. If I
follow the discussion correctly, the CPU works very differently from the
more conventional 6502, Z80 or 8088 etc. so they may not have any use
anyway?
I'm assuming the TI-99/4A had Editor/Assemblers available though, for those
who wanted to program in what would be a very different type of assembly
code. I guess some people must have done it, otherwise we wouldn't have
all those good TI-99/4A games?!
Terry (Tez)
On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 8:59 AM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 02/23/2014 11:35 AM, allison wrote:
The TI99/4 suffered from narrowing the bus and storing it in a
serial oriented byte wide system where a program
jump required
sending a new pointer to the start of a routine and I might add the
code was NOT in native assembler but in an interpreted form.
I've long thought that the strangling of the bus done on the TI 99/4 home
PC was quite possibly motivated by TI's not wanting to compete with its own
990 series of computers. The cost of a TI 990/4 was considerably higher
than a 99/4, even though both use the same MPU.
I find the I2L versions of the 9900 far more interesting as far as chips
go. They were used quite often in military gear, not as devices offered to
the general unwashed. In a similar way, one did not see the Fairchild 9940
in much general audience gear.
--Chuck