Recent developments

New emulator Nov 2016

The dos emulator of a TI-99/4a, pc99, has been rewritten for Windows and existing owners of the old software can purchase pc99w at a discount from 1st November 2016. The package is available to new owners from 1st January 2017, and includes not only pc99w, but also pc99dos and the full TI encyclopaedia The Cyc with an index over 1800 pages and magazines and newsletters in searchable form plus modules and disks of software. The package is supplied by CaDD on DVD or USB stick.

Computer Role-Playing Game

Adam Haase has been currently crafting a CRPG (Computer Role-Playing Game) using the original TI-99/4a hardware. He is using a special piece of hardware that has a PIO port and uses a CF card which not only acts as a disk drive, but also a 32k memory expansion and replaces the connection to the Peripheral Expansion Box.

Adam's current blog regarding the progress on his CRPG can be found here: http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg/

Assembler for 990 Mini Computer

While not a 99/4a developer, Dave Pitts worked as an Engineer for Texas Instruments, developing the operating system and assembler for the 990 Mini-Computer.

His assembler runs on the PC and is excellent for assembling (using the "-m 4" option) 99/4a assembler code. The resulting output is a text file (which would be DV/80 on the TI) containing the tagged object code that can be loaded using Editor/Assembler Option #3.

The output file, however, can be copied into a "\DSK1" folder that can be easily read by Classic99 without conversion.

TiDir

Fred has written an excellent utility named TiDir that allows people to create V9T9 formatted disk images and copy files between PC99 and V9T9 formatted disks to new ones. You can also view a TI disk directory, DV80 files and TI Artist images. You can also extract files and copy them to a PC folder.

I also believe that he is responsible for the Ti994W Emulator. It can be found on the Emulators page.

Rumor has it, there is a version which can take PC files and convert them into a 99/4a format for use on a disk image with most popular emulators.

spectra2

spectra2 is a library in TMS9900 assembly language for writing arcade games running on an unexpanded TI-99/4A console. The library will support sprites, speech & sound.

The documentation wiki pages can be found here.

Check the development thread for discussing future enhancements.