In article <starsabre-F253ED.05082531102007@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
jt august <starsabre@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I would argue, first, that even though the TI was older than the C=64,
> the TI was still more advanced. It is debatable, but I would say the TI
> sound chip was more powerful, as it had a wider dynamic range and was
> easier to program, both in TI BASIC and in assy. The graphics chip was
> more powerful, as characters could be redefined, and in assy and
> x-basic, the sprites were easily manipulated. And the TI had a 16-bit
> cpu that was far more powerful and twice as fast as the cpu of the C=64.
Except for one thing. They put in very little CPU RAM (256 bytes!), and
used the VDP RAM for storing BASIC programs. This made for very slow
performance without having an expansion unit. (Once in a Best catalog
store, I found a TI 99/4A sitting at the READY prompt. I hit the ENTER
key. It took a whole freaking second for it to do *nothing*!) It didn't
help performance any that the "registers" were kept in RAM. And while it
used a 16-bit CPU, it still had a 16-bit address bus and had the same
memory limitations as 8-bit computers in a day when a full 64K of DRAM
was becoming affordable.
TI's insistence on the PEB being the only official expansion option made
it unlikely that anyone would experience it in any other way than its
basic configuration, with tapes and cartridges. (There were third-party
options, but most TI owners wouldn't have known about them.) Even if it
was with IMHO a much less than perfect design, Commodore did make it
possible to hook up an affordable floppy disk drive without having to
buy a boat anchor first.
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