Well, here's my contribution to the TI-99/4A community. A few years back, I thought it would be neat to be able to play my old TI games on my PC. Instead of doing the smart thing (looking for an existing emulator), I sat down and wrote my own. At first is was a simple text-based simulation of the TI. Then I added graphical support for the OS/2 Presentation Manager. When I got bored with that, I ported it to Windows and added sound support. Now I've decided to try my hand at a Linux/cross-platform version. In the spirit of Linux and Open Source, I'm releasing the code under the GPL license.

Note: In order to run the emulator, you need to create a cartridge that contains the console ROM & GROMs from the TI. Texas Instruments will not allow these to be distributed, so you'll need to find a way to get them yourself. Please don't e-mail me asking for a copy - I won't even bother to respond. If you have a working copy of v9t9, instructions are included to help you create the required cartridge.

14-Jul-2012

Version 0.0.11: It's been a while, but this project is still alive. There hasn't been any single feature that warranted a new release, but since it's been so long since the last release, I thought I'd make a new one. The biggest change is the support for 64-bit systems. New Makefiles should make it easier to build on the Mac. There have also been a number of minor changes to the utilities and internal code (see the README file for details). Finally, limited support for CF7+/nanoPEB images has been added.

20-Sep-2003

Version 0.0.10: Minor improvements to some of the utilities and a fix for the install. The most notable improvement to the utilities is the ability to read .ark files (files compressed using Barry Boone's archiver). Using the disk utility, files in an archive can be extracted to a file and added to an existing disk image (oh yeah, disk can now add files as well).

30-Aug-2003

Version 0.0.9: Finally, ti99sim now runs on Mac OS X! I managed to convince my brother to let me play around on his Mac in an effort to get ti99sim working. The good news: It compiles and runs just fine on the Mac (last time I checked). The bad news: 1) I don't currently have access to the Mac, so no Mac release in the archives yet. 2) I'm not familiar enough with Mac OS X to make a proper install package. In order to use ti99sim, you'll need to open a terminal window and use the command line (just like everybody else).

For those of you that don't have a Mac, this release also adds resizable window support, new scaling routines (Scale2X & Scale3X from the AdvanceMAME project) for double-size and triple-size windows, an alternate color palette selection, selectable master volume level, and several minor improvements. There is also a new utility that will let you play speech samples from the speech synthesizer ROM from the command line.

30-Aug-2002

Version 0.0.8: Changes include: improved support for international keyboards, more accurate clock cycle emulation, proper support of reduced frame rates, better audio quality under Windows NT, and a verbose mode added to most programs. Emulation of the TMS9901 has also been rewritten to provide programs access to the chip's timer mode. There is also a new utility: dumpspch. This program allows you to dump a valid TI Speech ROM to either a hexadecimal or parsed text file. The parsed file allows you to more easily edit the individual LPC-10 speech frames. The modified file can then be converted back to a valid spchrom.bin file using mkspch. The decode utility has also been reworked to do a better job at detecting and recovering audio data from .wav files. The number of different .wav file formats supported has also been expanded. The README.html file has been updated and cleaned up as well.

06-Dec-2001

Version 0.0.7: There was a bug in the convert-ctg utility released in v0.0.6 that resulted in the inability to create a DSR cartridge (which meant no disk I/O). The TMS9918A (VDP) emulation support has also been improved and includes multicolor mode support, 4 sprite/line limit, 5th sprite detection, and coincidence checking. A few more minor changes and one new utility: list - a simple command line tool to list a TI BASIC/Extended BASIC program.