alt Hacker NewsNever knew the TI-99/4A was useful for anything but playing Parsec. That’s all I ever did on my BFF Mark’s TI-99/4A. Then I would go home, use my C64 and be grateful my parents didn’t get me a TI-99/4A.
Never knew the TI-99/4A was useful for anything but playing Parsec. That’s all I ever did on my BFF Mark’s TI-99/4A. Then I would go home, use my C64 and be grateful my parents didn’t get me a TI-99/4A.
Although I did love playing Parsec (and Fathom and TI Invaders and Munch Man and ...), I did a significant amount of programming on mine.
First I made a text-based "cave explorer" deal, with significant randomization, various choices that might lead to pits, monsters, rockfalls, and the like, with warnings and the ability to "back up." Also, some character creation business for Dungeons and Dragons (doing all of the attribute rolling, then selecting an optimal class, then doing the hitpoints, then some money, and on to one of twenty convenient "equipment packs" I designed), right on out to the printouts. Math drills.
I made a fairly dumb video game that drew in an uninspiring manner from Berzerk and Pac-Man and the like, which was quite slow due to the various walls and pits and such which had to be checked for in many lines of tedious IF THEN ELSE statements ... but then I hit on the idea of merely drawing all of these items and then checking the video register to see what was there, resulting in a massive speedup, or as much as one could manage using doubly-interpreted BASIC.
After I got the Speech Synthesis module, I revisited some of my dumb little games and added some voice bits, not much more than your Sinistar "I hunger!" bits.
My last was Black Cat, wherein your titular cat had to cross traffic (like Frogger) on one screen, navigate various screens of terrain, visit a child at school, and eventually find your way home, hopefully bringing with you a bird or mouse as a trophy for bonus points.
I only ever played Temple of Apshai on the Commodore.