Saturday, January 16, 2010

Parsec on the TI 99/4a

Q: What runs at 3 MHz with 256 bytes and 16 KB video RAM?


A: One pimp machine!

A recent game on Twitter is to describe one's original programming environment.

It brought back memories of the mighty Texas Instruments 99/4a (see it here): our family's first computer.

To be honest, I don't remember if I hammered in any programs into it. I know I did on the Commodore 64 (a screaming beast in its own right).

We did play games though. A favourite was Parsec, and sure enough, YouTube comes to the rescue here. Below is a video of gameplay!

(Note that the video features the voice synthesizer, which we didn't have. I bet the beeping sounds, though, are all too familiar to my parents.)



2 comments:

Unknown said...

My first computer was the T1994A also. I bet you guys got it the same year we did at Kmart. Did you have the casette player that came with it also. I wrote many programs on it, but I was always a better programer than you. I moved up the colour computer after that.

M Easter said...

@Vic I didn't know you had a TI 994A ! That is cool... I did remember that you were on the Dark Side with the ridiculous TRaSh-80

Better programmer... Only better/faster because you would drink an entire file into memory instead of actually writing the assigned data structure to hold it ;-)