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eesmithtoday at 8:28 AM1 replyview on HN

My Dad was convinced by the marketing that its 16-bit CPU was the wave of the future, unlike those old-fashioned 8-bit CPUs.

It had a smidge more than 4 games. I broke several joysticks playing TI Invaders, and my favorite was Parsec, which was also one of the games which supported the optional speech synthesizer. I also had Tunnels of Doom, Car Wars, and Tombstone City, and remember playing Alpiner.

That's 6 games right there, ... or in other words, a drop in the bucket compared to my friend's Apple ][. Alas. And he could use a floppy disk, while I only had cassette tape or cartridges.

One of my game cartridges was Extended Basic. That probably got the most use.


Replies

roelschroeventoday at 2:14 PM

I distinctly remember my dad too choosing for the TI-99/4A over the competition because of the 16-bit CPU. Little did he, let alone the little boy that I was at the time, know of the limitations of its weird design.