New Zealand Vintage Computer Forums

Another classic computer has taken up residence in the rest home. Not too much baggage with this one, but organ donations were required plus some time in the infirmary.

Here is how I got it:
http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blo ... tuting.htm

and here is how I've described it on the collections page:
http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/col ... i99-4a.htm

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.

Hi and welcome to the forums!

Yes, one thing my TI lacks at the moment is software. I'm waiting for a good solid state storage solution to become available for the machine so I can stock up. I'm aware of one (http://webpages.charter.net/nanopeb/) but someone may be working on another option.

In the mean time, I'm having fun now stocking up a C16/Plus 4 with a SD2IEC.

If you manage to get hold of the huge TI peripheral expansion box, there is a mod for the internal rs232 card that in effect lets you link the PC to the TI, nice and tidy wit no loose ends, you can then basically use your existing PC as a hard drive for the TI.
Although, I do agree that something that simply plugged into the cartridge port would be preferable.
I should also point out that it took me about 8 years to actuall get a TI expansion box from europe, they are incredibly rare here but fairly common in the US-postage is a killer as I'm sure you already know.

Good to hear you are also having fun with the C/16,plus4 side of things, the plus4 is one of my favourite machines for programming on, I got one about 5 years ago and found the basic fairly similar to the CBM 128 variety.