Texas Instruments TI-99

killerk1ghost · Post by **killerk1ghost** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 9:19 pm

Anyone ever thought of turning one of those old beasts into a portable?

Post by **bicostp** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 9:59 pm

I've got a couple of them; it looks like they output RGB of some sort. There's even a speech synthesis box for it! (They're identical to the one in the picture, but have a "Solid State" sticker near the cartridge slot.)

However they have one of the most annoying sound chips ever (as bad as the ColecoVision) and undoubtedly use crazy amounts of power. Never mind the fact that almost all expansion comes in the form of external slide-on modules that can be almost as big as the actual computer. I don't think there's a huge market of games for it, either. (I've got a book full of TI-BASIC games, some more huge than others, but some require the advanced BASIC cartridge.)

I took one of mine apart once to figure out why it only spits garbage onto the screen (everything else works fine), and it looks like the entire functional part of the motherboard is about the width of the keyboard.

It's possible in theory, but it would be impractical. The Commodore 64 is much better, and they've cloned it into a really flexible, small, efficient board that interfaces with PS/2 keyboards.

killerk1ghost · Post by **killerk1ghost** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 10:08 pm

That would make sense, I just thought that a TI-99 would be kinda cool as a laptop type deal