Comment by eesmith
9 hours ago
My Dad was convinced by the marketing that its 16-bit CPU was the wave of the future, unlike those old-fashioned 8-bit CPUs.
It had a smidge more than 4 games. I broke several joysticks playing TI Invaders, and my favorite was Parsec, which was also one of the games which supported the optional speech synthesizer. I also had Tunnels of Doom, Car Wars, and Tombstone City, and remember playing Alpiner.
That's 6 games right there, ... or in other words, a drop in the bucket compared to my friend's Apple ][. Alas. And he could use a floppy disk, while I only had cassette tape or cartridges.
One of my game cartridges was Extended Basic. That probably got the most use.
I distinctly remember my dad too choosing for the TI-99/4A over the competition because of the 16-bit CPU. Little did he, let alone the little boy that I was at the time, know of the limitations of its weird design.
>My Dad was convinced by the marketing that its 16-bit CPU was the wave of the future,
I think my mom was convinced because of bargain bin prices after it was more or less dead as a platform. But I'm not sure, she's not around to ask anymore... I've read though that after TI gave up on it, some department stores were dumping them for well under $100, and sometimes closer to $50.
I think I only once, ever, got it to load a saved program from cassette. I don't know if I was just a moron as a kid, or if they were actually that horrible for storage.