On Oct 31, 10:43 am, Bruce Tomlin <bruce#fanboy....@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> In article <starsabre-F253ED.05082531102...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> jt august <starsa...@[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*!)
(Great, where'd my cursor go!) Anyway, must've been a brain-dead
console. Never had that issue with any consoles...
>
> 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.
TI originally marketed "sidecar" devices, which many third-party
vendors marketed as well. Just take a look at old issues of 99'er
magazine (Ultracomp, Dyan(?), and several others offered memory,
RS232), Percom offered a disk drive/controller (really crappy compared
to a TI), etc.
Even after the PEB became a "better solution", companies like Corcomp,
Myarc, MorningStar, Foundation and others offered cards for the box...
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