#TI 99 EMULATOR ZOPHAR FREE#
A standard TI-99/8 console shows approximately 60K of free space for programs, and the addition of a 128K Memory Expansion increases that to over 170K. It also recognizes a much larger memory space. Third-party cartridges also have problems, as the V3.0 Operating System installed in the TI-99/8 expects at least one GROM in the cartridge and won't execute those that don't have one present.Įxtended BASIC II adds many useful functions and commands to the Extended BASIC programmer's tool set. There are problems with the Terminal Emulator II cartridge, in that only the terminal emulation functions of the cartridge work. The Editor Assembler cartridge fails when it checks for the 32K Memory Expansion card as part of its startup routine. The Extended BASIC cartridge does not work at all, because it conflicts with the built-in Extended BASIC II.
#TI 99 EMULATOR ZOPHAR SOFTWARE#
Most of the cartridge software for the TI-99/4A works, with some notable exceptions. Very little software designed specifically for the TI-99/8 was produced. Still, cartridges like Editor/Assembler may work with the PEB cards. However, some more test with the emulation in MESS showed that most peripheral cards will not work in Extended Basic II which is built into the TI-99/8 console. Follow the link for descriptions of the various TI-99/8 Peripherals. Note that many of the peripheral expansion cards designed for the TI-99/4A will also work with the TI-99/8. Bus speed dictates that memory expansion devices must connect through the PEB, as the HexBus does not have sufficient throughput to support it. Two different avenues to peripheral expansion exist: cards for the PEB and/or HexBus peripherals. Most of these bugs are within Extended BASIC II.
#TI 99 EMULATOR ZOPHAR CODE#
The website for the Amarillo User's Group also has documents outlining the known bugs in the code available to us. The commented code is located on the WHTech FTP site, along with documents containing the specifications for interfacing with the Hex-Bus peripherals and the source code for the TI-99/8 implementation of the Hex-Bus Interface. The source code for the TI-99/8 is available and has been assembled to create an emulated version of the computer operating under MESS. The main screen has an option to slow this down to the same speed as a TI-99/4A so that arcade game software written for the older machine remains playable. The TI-99/8 uses a TMS-9995 microprocessor clocked at 10 MHz. There is no need for an external speech synthesizer for the TI-99/8, as it is included on both versions of the motherboard. The majority of surviving machines do not have fully-functional versions of the UCSD p-System GROMs (or don't have them at all). GROMs are treated as devices by the operating system. Most of the ROMs were actually GROMs, a specialized medium-speed memory chip developed by TI with its own 13-bit address bus. 220 KB of System ROMs contains the code for the operating system, the HexBus I/O interface, TI Extended BASIC II, and the core support routines for the UCSD p-System. There is 64KB of random access memory standard on both versions of the TI-99/8 motherboard, with the possibility of extending that to 15MB using memory cards in the Peripheral Expansion Box (PEB). It met that mark in all but one respect: the TMS-9118 video processor used on both versions of the TI-99/8 has a feature set almost identical to that of the TMS-9918A used in its predecessor. The TI-99/8 was intended to be a major improvement over the TI-99/4A.