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...

My first computer

Some time ago one of the younger folks (I think he was 17 at the time) at our game night said something like "Oh that reminds me of an old computer game."
I replied "I think your idea of an old computer game and my idea of an old computer game are not on the same scale."

To which he replied that the game in question was about 10 years old. I fired back "Oh, okay, well my first computer had 16 kilobytes of RAM and we saved programs to an audio tape drive..."

At that point one of the 20somethings in the group decided to chime in "I'm going to call shenanigans on that one." but here it is, my TI99/4A

The conversation left me thinking about my good old TI, this was my first computer, we got it around 1982, I'd have been about 6. This was a time when having a computer was kind of a big deal. The TI was already on borrowed time, it was discontinued in 1984, and as we didn't have a whole lot of money we didn't have a ton of accessories for it but it still holds a place in my heart. The TI was a big force in my life, it helped me to learn to read and do math, to learn how to type and a lot about how computers worked. When he brought it home my dad declared "This will take the boy through college." Actually it didn't even get the boy into high school. In junior high we got an Atari 130XE, an Atari mostly because my friend Nate had one. That computer was on borrowed time too but thats a story for another day.

Anyhow my favorite game of all time is "Tunnels of Doom: Quest for the King" which was basically the first RPG, a party of up to 4 adventurers descends into a dungeon to save the king and his orb of power. Actually what I didn't know at the time was that while the basic game came with "Quest for the King" and "Pennies and Prizes" there were other adventures that could be played with that one cartridge. The game actually came in 2 parts, the cartridge and, in our case, a cassette, that had the adventures. There was a disk based version too but we didn't have a disk drive to use that. I remember vividly the 200 seconds it took the load the cassette, forever at the time, even as an adult waiting for the cassette to do its thing is agonizing, there was to be a better way.

Well there is, look at the picture of the TI again, notice the thing on top? Thats a Raspberry PI, if you're not familiar the Raspberry PI is a credit card sized computer originally intended to get kids interested in computers, this one is connected to:

The conflagration hanging off the side of the computer is commonly called a sidecar, TI used this mostly for the speech synthesizer, in this particular sidecar is a 32K RAM expander (more than twice the original RAM) and a TIPI. The TIPI (pronounced tip-ee) is really more like a TI-PI and connects the TI to the Raspberry PI. This allows for all sorts of new things but mostly I bought it to have the PI act like a disk drive for the TI allowing me to load Tunnels Of Doom nearly instantly and easily save my games in progress, a 10 level dungeon takes many hours of play.

Overall this project has been tremendously fun although its also quite frustrating, I'm not a computer developer by any stretch of the imagination and the TIPI has stretched my skills to the limit, often I've told people "I'm not really sure I'm smart enough to have this thing..." which isn't far from the truth. I've really just scratched the surface of what its capable of but I'm having fun.


Oh and as a side note I've probably paid more for the TIPI, 32K RAM expansion and PI than my dad did for the computer in the first place...