@UsagiElectric on YouTube has a series of videos on building a homebrew around the TMS9900 processor. Would be cool if a unix-like OS could be used on something like that, though sounds like this project is specifically targeting the TI-99/4A system.
The TI-99/4A was the first computer I owned as a teenager. I had used TRS-80s and Apple ][ at school. I eventually bought the expansion box and a couple of accessory cards (floppy disk drive, memory and RS232). It all went in the e-waste dumpster about 20 years ago during a move.
Same, though I bought one off Facebook marketplace recently- minus the expansion box. Lots of memories learning programming and the explosively better 'Extended Basic' vs the built in version.
My parents bought one for the house when I was in elementary school. I still remember the sound of the Speech Synthesizer, discovering 20 GOTO 10, and playing Hunt the Wumpus.
TI-99/4A was my first computer as well. I still have two of them, and they still work as well as they did in the '80s. I graduated to an Apple ][GS which I still have as well, although it needs some TLC before attempting to boot it so as not to let out the magic smoke.
I had one in grade school. Taught me the value of backups early in life. Spent all night typing in a game from a magazine. Started it without saving to tape first. It was so loud! Panicked and restarted the machine. Sadness ensued.
Replaced it with a C128-D. Didn’t get my first intel until I bought a 386 after graduating high school. Good times.
Same here - parents bought one for me in 1982, IIRC. By 1984 I had moved to Atari XL, but I'll always have a soft spot for the TI-99/4A, Extended Basic cartridge, speech synthesizer, cassette drive, etc.
My sister and I used to co-type programs from "Compute!". The times were so much simpler then..
The TI99/4A was also my first computer. I was about 5, and I didn’t really seriously try writing programs until I was about 8. Fortunately, since my father bought this for work, we had a large collection of peripherals, including the floppy disk drive. Unfortunately I learned the hard way why my father stopped using it: peripheral expansion bus devices were exquisitely sensitive to static shocks. I remember reeling in horror after watching hours of work just disappear from the disk drive. I suppose this was probably a good lesson to learn at an early age!
HOLY COW. Thank you for this. I LOVE the Ti99/4a, its one of the first computers I ever used. I've got one up and running at home now currently and can't wait to try this.
Btw, there is a lovely third party replacement for the TI99/4a video chip that lets you output VGA. It’s a major life improvement if you are seriously using it. I Dremeled my case but you can route the ribbon cable to avoid it if you’d prefer not to modify anything. Happy to send you a link if you don’t already know about it.
Thanks! I've got mine running in to a 9" Pelco PVM and it works well but yea, its tiny. I'd love to plumb in VGA and use a 15" flat panel. Would love a link.
It's cool because the registers are all in RAM, with a "workspace pointer" on the CPU pointing at where they are. This is slow, but a context switch is just changing that pointer.
It's not all that slow as a concept at that time when RAM speeds were as fast as CPU speeds. I think it's just that TI's implementation of the concept in that particular cost-optimised home computer was pretty bad -- the actual registers were in 256 bytes of fast static RAM, but the rest of the system memory (both ROM and RAM) was accessed very inefficiently, not only 1 bytes at a time on a 16 bit machine, but also with something like 4 wait states for every byte.
The 6502 is not very different with a very small number of registers and Zero Page being used for most of what a modern machine would use registers for. For example (unlike the Z80) there is no register-to-register add or subtract or compare -- you can only add/sub/cmp/and/or/xor a memory location to the accumulator. Also, pointers can only be done using a pair of adjacent Zero Page locations.
As long as you were using data in those in-RAM registers the TI-99/4 was around four times faster than a 1 MHz 6502 for 16 bit arithmetic -- and with a single 2-byte instruction doing what needed 7 instructions and 13 bytes of code on 6502 -- and it was also twice as fast on 8 bit arithmetic.
It was just the cheap-ass main memory (and I/O) implementation that crippled it.
Well, it has 256 bytes of RAM which is basically a really big register file, and everything else goes in the 16kb of "video RAM" which you can read and write by poking at I/O registers. So it is not easy to program.
It's arguably the only 8-bit computer which has a really different architecture from the others. You could otherwise imagine pulling the SID chip off a C-64 and putting it on a TRS-80 Color Computer etc.
Sharing the main RAM with video was a weak point in computers of that time period because the video system stole many of the memory access cycles. Some recent retrocomputers that revisit that period like
have a full-size memory bank and a video RAM memory bank which is accessed through a port which can be pretty efficient because you can auto-incremement the address register and just write 1 byte to the port to write 1 byte to video RAM and repeat.
Yep, but it lacks a MMU so memory protection and paging are going to require a lot of work. I think the only reason this is feasible at all is they're running the OS out of a ROM cartridge.
The PDP machines that Unix was developed on had MMUs, which they needed because the 16 bit processors couldn't address the multi-megabyte address space the hardware supported.
The PDP-10 had an MMU similar to a modern MMU with page tables and such, the PDP-11 had an 8-segment-of-8kb MMU like what the TRS-80 Color Computer 3 had except the PDP-11 had a real supervisor mode and if a user mode program tried to change the MMU configuration it would fault.
In fact the 9900 itself was used in an entire line of minicomputers that included a hardware memory map.
The 9900 is a single chip implementation of the CPU board in the TI 990. They even created a dedicated memory mapper chip to go along with the product line, though it is significantly different than the one in the minicomputer line.
(edit: the 990 was first built in the early 70s, memory mappers are quite old conceptually)
(edit 2: in fact the necessity of using a memory mapper is what killed the platform, and was one of the things that made the IBM PC team decline the 9900.)
Unfortunately I don't think that there is a reasonable way to perform real hardware-level memory protection with that chip alone. I'm working on a project documenting the genesis of the 99000 chips, which include a privilege bit in the status register, from the minicomputer line.
Essay forthcoming, and probably an OS. Maybe a year...
One chip that could be used as a memory mapper for the 9900 (but wasn't in the TI99/4A) was the 74LS670, which was used in the IBM 5150 PC to allow the 8237 DMA chip to access more than 64KB (a limit that wasn't a problem when used in a 8080 system).
I learned to program on this exact hardware in the early 80s as a small child. It uses BASIC. It's hard drive was modem tones recorded to an analog audio tape. Its monitor was an analog TV. There was no mouse. The keyboard was built into the computer itself.
A USB video capture device or a converter box. There are devices sold specifically to interface these old machines with modern displays. One of the more famous ones is the RetroTINK.
@UsagiElectric on YouTube has a series of videos on building a homebrew around the TMS9900 processor. Would be cool if a unix-like OS could be used on something like that, though sounds like this project is specifically targeting the TI-99/4A system.
The TI-99/4A was the first computer I owned as a teenager. I had used TRS-80s and Apple ][ at school. I eventually bought the expansion box and a couple of accessory cards (floppy disk drive, memory and RS232). It all went in the e-waste dumpster about 20 years ago during a move.
Same, though I bought one off Facebook marketplace recently- minus the expansion box. Lots of memories learning programming and the explosively better 'Extended Basic' vs the built in version.
My parents bought one for the house when I was in elementary school. I still remember the sound of the Speech Synthesizer, discovering 20 GOTO 10, and playing Hunt the Wumpus.
TI-99/4A was my first computer as well. I still have two of them, and they still work as well as they did in the '80s. I graduated to an Apple ][GS which I still have as well, although it needs some TLC before attempting to boot it so as not to let out the magic smoke.
I had one in grade school. Taught me the value of backups early in life. Spent all night typing in a game from a magazine. Started it without saving to tape first. It was so loud! Panicked and restarted the machine. Sadness ensued.
Replaced it with a C128-D. Didn’t get my first intel until I bought a 386 after graduating high school. Good times.
Same here - parents bought one for me in 1982, IIRC. By 1984 I had moved to Atari XL, but I'll always have a soft spot for the TI-99/4A, Extended Basic cartridge, speech synthesizer, cassette drive, etc.
My sister and I used to co-type programs from "Compute!". The times were so much simpler then..
The TI99/4A was my first computer when I was 7 or 8. Unfortunately, no cassette drive. As soon as I shut it off, my basic program was gone!
The TI99/4A was also my first computer. I was about 5, and I didn’t really seriously try writing programs until I was about 8. Fortunately, since my father bought this for work, we had a large collection of peripherals, including the floppy disk drive. Unfortunately I learned the hard way why my father stopped using it: peripheral expansion bus devices were exquisitely sensitive to static shocks. I remember reeling in horror after watching hours of work just disappear from the disk drive. I suppose this was probably a good lesson to learn at an early age!
Can you drop this yt channel name?
you only get 3 guesses
HOLY COW. Thank you for this. I LOVE the Ti99/4a, its one of the first computers I ever used. I've got one up and running at home now currently and can't wait to try this.
Btw, there is a lovely third party replacement for the TI99/4a video chip that lets you output VGA. It’s a major life improvement if you are seriously using it. I Dremeled my case but you can route the ribbon cable to avoid it if you’d prefer not to modify anything. Happy to send you a link if you don’t already know about it.
Thanks! I've got mine running in to a 9" Pelco PVM and it works well but yea, its tiny. I'd love to plumb in VGA and use a 15" flat panel. Would love a link.
It's the first computer I ever programmed, I was twelve years old then. <3
This is the main updated comment with the user guide and download
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/380883-unix99-a-unix-like-...
Thanks. I wasn't looking forward to browsing all those pages in the hopes of finding the source. Did they never put it up on GitHub?
Wow. The TI-99 is such a perfect fit for this too given the chip was designed for multi-user computing in a way other home computer chips weren’t.
All due to TI’s desire to use the same chip standards across all their machines big and small, IIRC.
While the CPU is a better fit than the 8 bit contemporaries, the 16kb of working memory is going to be a struggle.
It's cool because the registers are all in RAM, with a "workspace pointer" on the CPU pointing at where they are. This is slow, but a context switch is just changing that pointer.
It's not all that slow as a concept at that time when RAM speeds were as fast as CPU speeds. I think it's just that TI's implementation of the concept in that particular cost-optimised home computer was pretty bad -- the actual registers were in 256 bytes of fast static RAM, but the rest of the system memory (both ROM and RAM) was accessed very inefficiently, not only 1 bytes at a time on a 16 bit machine, but also with something like 4 wait states for every byte.
The 6502 is not very different with a very small number of registers and Zero Page being used for most of what a modern machine would use registers for. For example (unlike the Z80) there is no register-to-register add or subtract or compare -- you can only add/sub/cmp/and/or/xor a memory location to the accumulator. Also, pointers can only be done using a pair of adjacent Zero Page locations.
As long as you were using data in those in-RAM registers the TI-99/4 was around four times faster than a 1 MHz 6502 for 16 bit arithmetic -- and with a single 2-byte instruction doing what needed 7 instructions and 13 bytes of code on 6502 -- and it was also twice as fast on 8 bit arithmetic.
It was just the cheap-ass main memory (and I/O) implementation that crippled it.
Well, it has 256 bytes of RAM which is basically a really big register file, and everything else goes in the 16kb of "video RAM" which you can read and write by poking at I/O registers. So it is not easy to program.
It's arguably the only 8-bit computer which has a really different architecture from the others. You could otherwise imagine pulling the SID chip off a C-64 and putting it on a TRS-80 Color Computer etc.
Sharing the main RAM with video was a weak point in computers of that time period because the video system stole many of the memory access cycles. Some recent retrocomputers that revisit that period like
https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commander_X16
have a full-size memory bank and a video RAM memory bank which is accessed through a port which can be pretty efficient because you can auto-incremement the address register and just write 1 byte to the port to write 1 byte to video RAM and repeat.
Well I mean it fits in with the 8-bit era machines as far as performance but that CPU was absolutely 16 bit.
Yep, but it lacks a MMU so memory protection and paging are going to require a lot of work. I think the only reason this is feasible at all is they're running the OS out of a ROM cartridge.
The PDP machines that Unix was developed on had MMUs, which they needed because the 16 bit processors couldn't address the multi-megabyte address space the hardware supported.
I'm pretty sure the Centurion doesn't run Unix.
The PDP-10 had an MMU similar to a modern MMU with page tables and such, the PDP-11 had an 8-segment-of-8kb MMU like what the TRS-80 Color Computer 3 had except the PDP-11 had a real supervisor mode and if a user mode program tried to change the MMU configuration it would fault.
Did the minicomputers of the time have MMUs?
I thought UsagiElectric showed a case where his Centurion didn’t, but I may be misremembering.
In fact the 9900 itself was used in an entire line of minicomputers that included a hardware memory map.
The 9900 is a single chip implementation of the CPU board in the TI 990. They even created a dedicated memory mapper chip to go along with the product line, though it is significantly different than the one in the minicomputer line.
(edit: the 990 was first built in the early 70s, memory mappers are quite old conceptually)
(edit 2: in fact the necessity of using a memory mapper is what killed the platform, and was one of the things that made the IBM PC team decline the 9900.)
Unfortunately I don't think that there is a reasonable way to perform real hardware-level memory protection with that chip alone. I'm working on a project documenting the genesis of the 99000 chips, which include a privilege bit in the status register, from the minicomputer line.
Essay forthcoming, and probably an OS. Maybe a year...
One chip that could be used as a memory mapper for the 9900 (but wasn't in the TI99/4A) was the 74LS670, which was used in the IBM 5150 PC to allow the 8237 DMA chip to access more than 64KB (a limit that wasn't a problem when used in a 8080 system).
Yeah it really was an interesting choice on their part. Makes sense as a move for TI. Not the target market.
For some reason I was thinking it was that $99 dollar Sinclare from the 80s which had the most unusable keyboard on earth.
I learned to program on this exact hardware in the early 80s as a small child. It uses BASIC. It's hard drive was modem tones recorded to an analog audio tape. Its monitor was an analog TV. There was no mouse. The keyboard was built into the computer itself.
So assuming one wanted to buy a used one of these (I had timex sinclairs around this time) how would one display the composite video nowdays?
I'm using a Pelco 9" PVM that had a former life as a security camera monitor. Suprisingly good video for composite, but alas its not very large.
A USB video capture device or a converter box. There are devices sold specifically to interface these old machines with modern displays. One of the more famous ones is the RetroTINK.
Yep, I have an HDMI converter box that works great I got off eBay.
The joy of computing still lives in the age of AI...
made me remember knightOS
https://github.com/KnightOS/KnightOS
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
WoW!
Does it run PARSEC? Nice shot captain!