eschaton posted:

what does your heart tell you

post the membrane

blugu64 posted:

you need to find the speech synthesizer

Silver Alicorn posted:

akadajet posted:

Nice computer but what is up with that fail non-crt monitor?

akadajet posted:

Can you use those color studio monitors that are cheap on ebay?

flakeloaf posted:

lol if you aren't still finding 75-300 ohm converters in the bottom of every box in the house

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=68783#c782200 posted:

Thought I'd write a little bit up on the genesis of this prod in case you guys are interested. We believe this is the first true demo/megademo on the TI99/4A, ever. Of course you have to be a little strict with the definition of a 'demo' to get that, but hey, it works for us.

In 2014 I was visiting a foreign (to me) city, and found a dusty boxed TI99 in a pawn shop, buried under some hi-fi gear. I didn't buy it at the time, but I looked up if there had ever been a demoscene *anything* on it, and back then found nothing. That got me thinking. About six months later I moved to the same city, visited the same pawn shop, and haggled my way into very cheap TI ownership. At that point I asked Orbitaldecay if he was interested in something on it, and he absolutely was.

The original plan was a musicdisk (naturally my idea) or a simple scroller+effect+tune intro. The soundchip turned out to have a rather steep learning curve for me, and Orby & I were busy with some other prods. But the idea didn't go away. Sometime before @Party 2016, Orby got the ball rolling by getting RamonB5 interested and it was game on.

In the meantime 99tro by Frog got released, as well as some scene-ish but not quite "in the scene" stuff like Happy New Year 2015 by Asmusr (^^ see credits) so it was clear a simple intro would no longer cut it.

Fortunately, Orby and Ramon managed to recruit some of the best active devs on this platform, and once everyone was on board, after almost a year of hard work, here we are. Hopefully the results paid off. I personally am unbelievably proud of this thing, sure it's got a couple rough edges but for a platform first I think we set the bar at a pretty good height. Now the question is, who's gonna be the next challenger?

Some fun facts about the platform & this prod:
- We have the same sound & gfx chip as the MSX to work with, and a 16-bit CPU. That's awesome right? Well, the CPU is slow (3MHz) and *majorly* gimped by its 8-bit bus. It was never intended to go in this machine and it shows.
- An unexpanded TI has 256 bytes of general purpose "fast" RAM on that 8-bit bus. It also has 16k of video RAM but you can't use that for storing miscellaneous code or data. The usual add-on floppy controller gives you another 32k of *horrendously slow* RAM, and we ended up having to require that. It's there, it helps, but we still tried to avoid it as much as possible.
- The TI's built-in BASIC is slow and useless, and there's *no* ability to run inline assembly or compiled programs from disk. The assembler is supplied on a cartridge and requires the 32k RAM expansion. You can also get extended BASIC on a cartridge that is much better.
- You can run our demo direct from its own cartridge, or from disk using the "editor/assembler" cart, *or* from disk using an extended BASIC cart. That required three different loaders, but the choice is yours.
- Of the three main emulators that are around for this thing, two of them - Classic99 and JS99er - were made by members of the demo dev team, Tursi and Asmusr respectively. They have both since been updated to run all the scanline effects & general hackery that we needed to make this thing work, so go ahead and emulate. B)