Going vintage, again

I think I've written about my first computer on here before but its been awhile. To bring you back up to speed its my old TI99/4A. It came to me for Christmas 1983 a mere 2 months after the model had been discontinued. 😎

In 2018 I picked up a TIPI for it. The TIPI connects my TI to a Raspberry PI which allows all sorts of interesting things. I primarily wanted it for mass storage. TI used a gigantic "Peripheral Expansion Box" (PEB) for floppy drives and its really inconvenient and loud. The TIPI is little and handy:

You actually can't see the TIPI in this picture, at the right side of the computer theres a sidecar that contains a 32K RAM expander and the TIPI. On top of the computer is a Raspberry PI 3.

Mostly what I got the TIPI for is to play my favorite video game of all time, "Tunnels of Doom" (ToD).

ToD is one of the original role playing games, its actually a framework under which many games or I guess game scenarios can be played. The one we played when I was a kid was "Quest for the King" where you take a group of adventurers into a dungeon to save the king and his orb of power.

The worst thing about ToD as a kid was the load times where you had to wait 200 seconds (3 1/3 minutes) for it to load from audio tape. Then often the tape load would fail and you would need to try again. The TIPI is so easy, I just type "TIPI.TOD.QUEST" and it loads in a second or two.

After playing a quick game I messed around with the telnet client. I managed to log into the Heatwave BBS which at least purports to be running on Geneve hardware which is old school cool.

Anyhow in recent days I've run the TI/TIPI combo 3 or 4 more times. I've got a game of TIPI Chess underway. This is actual multiplayer chess across the internet. Its slow, I'm generally making a move every other day but we're getting it done. I've also logged into Heatwave a few more times and played some door games.

I missed the BBS scene back in the day, I was just a little too young. So its fun going back and playing around on Heatwave to get some idea what it was like back then. So far I've lost a game of Battleship but it was oh so close. I've also lost the "Trolls Lair" text adventure several times, I can't figure out how to get past the troll...