TI-99/4A. It
was a Christmas present from my parents in 1981 (or was
that 1982? ... off by one again). My dad wanted to prevent
me from installing games on his Apple ][+ (he used it
for accounting purposes). The TI-99/4A hooked up to a
conventional TV set and had a cartridge slot as well as
a cassette tape connection (i still have the original
portable cassette tape player that i used). I remember
playing a lot of games like Hunt the Wumpus and
Parsec,
but eventually i learned how to create and animate sprites
and wrote my first game - Money Bags. Simple. You control a
cursor (an arrow) and move around the screen. There are
two bags: one is a gold coin and the other is a bomb ... i
think you see where this is going ;)
Even though the TI-99/4A was my first computer, it just couldn't compare to that "monster" Apple ][+ that was in
the other room. Anyone remember
Temple Of Apshai? Bard's Tale? Wizardry? Escape From Rungistan? Zork! Lot's of oldies ...
but as well as playing games, i did manage to learn some
BASIC programming. I had no troubles with loops and
conditional branching, but i couldn't grasp the concept of
peeks and pokes (i had no understanding of RAM, address
space, and memory allocation), so eventually i lost
interest in programming (which i wouldn't gain back until
1996). I (ab)used that Apple until about 1988 and it
still works ... i have no idea what happened to the TI-99/4A however.
jeffa
L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)
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