by am1933 on Tue Mar 25, 2014 8:22 pm
This was my first computer and being based in the UK-made me as popular as a leper with aids at school, software and hardware availability was the major factor in me eventually moving to an Atari 800XL.
around about 2005 I started seeing a lot of TI related stuff on Ebay and took the plunge once again-only this time I was able to put together the kind of system I could only have dreamed about years ago.
I now own 5 ti99/4a's, speech synthesizer, ti joysticks, ti peripheral expansion box with twin disk drives and a 512k ram disk expansion, super sketch drawing tablet, about 120 cartridges and a load of disk and tape software.
The homebrew hardware and software scene has now really taken off for the machine, all the usual kind of stuff like memory card based harddrives and graphics chip upgrades are now doing the rounds and some of the games being developed have to be seen to be believed, the newly developed games by a Danish coder by the name of Rasmus Moustgaard are truly amazing, he has done an amazingly smooth,fast and professional version of Scramble and a Spy Hunter based game called Road Hunter which in my opinion are both better than any comparable 8 bit conversions that I have seen.