Comment by eesmith
13 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.
Tape save and load seemed pretty reasonable on our system. It does depend rather on the tape deck you're using and also on getting the volume and tone settings right, though. We had the official TI tape deck for it.