This newsletter is dedicated to the ongoing support for the Texas Instruments 99/4a and Myarc Geneve 9640 user community and is published by SHIFT838.
I have been in contact with Ralph Rees which was the President and Newsletter editor for the Phoenix Users Group. Ralph has given me permission to take articles he has provided and publish in this newsletter for fellow TI’ers to enjoy. Some may have seen these before but I am sure a majority of us have not and it will be a wealth of new information to some of us. The amount of information that Ralph has sent me is quite a bit so I will be adding one article to the newsletter every month.
Thanks to all that have subscribed!
Interviews
I had a suggestion from a subscriber to get an interview with Jim (Ksural) as a few people inquired that they would be interested in hearing from him and the type of collection he has. This is a very interesting read and I am happy to be able to provide this to the readers as I am sure that Jim was happy to participate.
Jim (Ksural)
1. When did you first get into the TI and what helped make your decision to go with the TI and then later the Geneve?
I bought my first TI in late 1981 as an early Christmas present to myself. I paid $399 for it through the military Exchange mail order catalog. I bought a copy of one of my favorite games, TI Invaders, and a set of Joysticks at the same time. I also ordered TI Extended BASIC, but that was during the period of time where it was a very hard module to get, as they had just found the bug in V100 and there were a lot of backorders while waiting for the V110 modules. I think I finally received mine in April or May of 1982. I had been playing with other peoples' computers for a couple of years before I settled on the TI. I tried the TRS-80, Altair, Apple II, Atari 400, and several CP/M machines before one of my friends bought a 99/4A. We learned to program BASIC on it together in the summer of 1981. I really liked the machine then, partly because of the keyboard and partly because of the implementation of Invaders—and I've never regretted choosing it. I bought my first Geneve in 1987 (part of the Tenex pre-order), and worked my way through all of the strange bugs contained in the earliest editions of MDOS and ABASIC. When the opportunity to buy out the source code from Myarc came along, I was one of the first contributors to the project. I did a lot of interesting work with that Geneve—including typing in the entire text of the TI GPL Handbook, as my copy was just good enough to read but not good enough to copy again and a lot of people wanted one.
2. How many different TI and/or Geneve systems do you have and what is their configurations? (I know some TI'ers are very interested in hearing about your collection.)
I probably have a lot more systems than most. I have one Geneve set up in a TI PEB with a BwG Floppy controller, a Rave Speech Adapter, a Horizon MEMEX card, an HRD 1000, and a Myarc HFDC. I have a second Geneve set up in a Rave PE2 box as my spare machine, but it isn't set up at the moment. I have a number of TI-99/4As set up as well. My boys have one in our living room that is set up with a Speech Synthesizer and a Myarc MPES 50 Expansion system. I have a full SNUG system set up in my computer room that I haven't been able to use lately because I've got it blocked from direct access as a result of setting up an EPROM-burning station in front of it for the various cartridge projects. I also have a standard 99/4A set up with a Mechatronic GRAM Karte, TI RS-232, Berlin Speech Adapter, p-Code card, Myarc 80-track Floppy Controller and a TI 32K card. Next to it, I have a TI-99/8 set up with a PEB containing an Armadillo Interface, 512K Memory Expansion, TI RS-232, and a Myarc Floppy Controller.
I have another 20-30 consoles, including four or five 99/4s of various types (including the motherboard from a 99/4 prototype); another 99/8 (I have one of each of the two motherboard types); and more strange PEB cards than most people have heard of. They include the TI IEEE-488 card, the TI DSDD controller card, the TI 128K memory card for the 99/4A (and one of a different type for the 99/8), the TI EPROM card, a TI FORTI card, a DataBioTics Grand RAM (I have to repair some battery damage on that one yet), an Asgard AMS, a SW99ers SAMS, a couple more SAMS boards that I built, several Horizon RAM Disks of various sizes, an ICS 32K card (as well as similar cards from CorComp, Myarc, Atronic, and TI), a Wiesbaden RS-232 Card (along with similar CorComp and Myarc cards), a Myarc personality card, a WHT SCSI card, a Nouspikel IDE card, and a SNUG ASCSI (in addition to the full set of SNUG cards in my SNUG system).
I also have a lot of sidecar things, as hinted at by the system using the Myarc MPES 50. I have the TI 32K, RS-232, SSSD Disk Controller, Thermal Printer, TI GSIM (the first GRAM device for the TI), TI EGROM Boxes of several types (GROM simulators using ROMS), Hex-Bus Interfaces and a nearly complete set of Hex-Bus peripherals (only missing the Hex-Bus Display Adapter), Atronic RS-232 and 32K sidecars, a Mechatronics 80-Column Card, Tachyon 32K, Doryt 32K, ICS 32K, Boxcar RS-232, CorComp 9900, CorComp 32K, CorComp Clock, Percom Data TX99, and a few others (from Italy and elsewhere in Europe).
3. What are a couple of your major accomplishments surrounding the TI and/or Geneve you have accomplished and/or been a part of?
Being part of the MDOS buyout was probably my personal favorite accomplishment, as that made survival of the Geneve possible. Other than that, my favorite recent accomplishment is the project to create the UberGROM cartridge boards in concert with Jon Guidry and Tursi. We bounced ideas off of each other for months as we refined the requirements on that one—and the software Tursi designed to make all of it work is fantastic. I've gotten good at doing hardware layouts, but it is the software that makes it live. The 512K cartridge boards were a direct descendent of the UberGROM, as I realized that I could use the same circuit I designed for the ROM side of that board as a standalone board—and then I extended it again to make the 2048K boards. I don't think any of these projects would have taken off half as well as they did without the valuable work of one individual: Tony Knerr. He built several images for the UberGROM, the 512K board, and the 2048K board to give valid use cases for all of them. None of us works in a vacuum anymore—and the teams that build the newest hardware/software for our TI machines exist in many cases because of the comfortable environment presented by the AtariAge forum.
4. What are a few of the pieces of hardware you have that you think you could not live without for the TI/Geneve and why?
I definitely need the Hard Disk controllers, as none of the RAM Disks available to us have the huge amount of storage space they provide (yet—as some thoughts burbling about between Tim Tesch and I may actually get us to a 20MB RAM Disk). My other major needs are GRAM devices to simulate cartridges that I haven't been able to find yet and 80-Column cards for expanded display capability.
5. What are a few of the rare hardware items you have for the TI/Geneve ?
I pretty much answered this one already up above. Probably the rarest items I have are an Armadillo Interface with the space to add 64K of memory on it (filling a hole that would otherwise exist in the 99/8s memory map) and the RS-232 card with a 99/8 DSR. The other truly interesting items are a pair of cards by Foundation Computing: an 80-Column card (pretty much text only, as it is for monochrome monitors) and a CP/M card (that actually used a CP/M work alike called RP/M). Several folks have one of the CP/M cards, but I've never seen another of the 80-column cards (and I don't have the manual for mine).
6. What are some of the rare software titles you have in your collection?
I have a nearly complete set of the Scott Foresman School Management Applications in their original binders (my set contains all but two of the released cartridges). I even have an additional pre-production prototype of one of them. I also have an Arcturus Module from Exceltek, a pre-production prototype of the Crossfire module, LOGO in several languages—Italian, Dutch, German, and Spanish, and an original GROM for the SMU Circuit Analysis I module.
7. Anything new you care to share that you are currently working on?
I'm working on a lot of things at the moment. Some of them are closer to final than others—and some may never see the light of day if insurmountable bugs crop up. Two projects are nearly ready for final test right now though: a PEB splitter board that plugs into the side of the 99/4A and gives two separate expansion paths. This can be used several ways: you can put a PEB and one of the CF7+/NANO PEB devices on one leg and a PEB on the other (although only one can be turned on at any given moment in time), or you can connect a pair of Flex Cable Interfaces to it and run two PEBs simultaneously. This is a good solution for those who've run out of slots in their primary PEB, and as long as each device in the PEBs is using a unique CRU address, there will be no conflicts.
The other item getting close to a solution is a remake of the Australian Quest RAM Disk. It isn't all that big—512K, but that is big enough to do a lot of things, especially if you put more than one of them into the PEB. On other projects that are still having issues, I've been trying to get Thierry Nouspikel's HyperAMS boards to work. We're still trying to work out the remaining issues on that one though.
8. With the various hardware and software that has come out in the last few years, In your opinion, where do you see the TI and Geneve development heading in the next 5 to 10 years for software and/or hardware?
Software will be where the majority of totally new development will occur, at least in my mind, as the programmers find ways to exploit the huge spaces available with the new cartridge boards. There will probably be some refinements of what is out there hardware-wise (like the interesting Quad Forth processor board Mark Wills has been playing with), but I see a lot of action there to redo things that aren't available anymore just so we can keep our systems going. The market is too small for many new PEB boards, as there will be so few sold that almost no software will be developed for them. The SAMS is a good case in point—an excellent memory expansion that has stayed just shy of the critical mass it needs to allow a lot of developers to target software to it. Rich Gilbertson has done a great job making RXB AMS-aware, as has Mark Wills in his Turbo Forth, but there are still only a very small number of programs available that use AMS memory. I do plan to make sure it remains available so that more people can incorporate AMS memory cards in their systems (and hopefully jump-start future software development there).
