Don't Mess with Texas – TI-99/4A Megademo [video]

Don't Mess with Texas – TI-99/4A Megademo [video]
youtube.com

http://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html

At least Extended Basic allowed you to use sprites and overall felt a bit faster.

In TI Basic, you accessed the more interesting parts of the machine "Call" functions (e.g. "Call Color", "Call Char", "Call hchar", etc.), and I always found Commodores peek/poke mess very primitive and a bit more inaccessible in comparison. On the other hand the TIs basic and extended basic didn't allow you to access the full capabilities of the machine. Possibly because they wanted you to buy their expansion cards, which I always thought was a dumb mistake from TIs side. That, and that super slow Basic. Especially, considering that the TI has decent capabilities on paper.

I was only about 7 years when I started programming on the TI, and I always wanted to try to write assembler on it, but (happily) moved on to more powerful computers before I got around to it a few years later. I believe it required an extra expansion card to unlock assembler -- but I really wanted to see what the machine was capable of unconstrained by the Basic Interpreter.

Thanks to the guys who made this demo. It is fun to finally get to see what could have been, and super impressive for someone who grew up programming the machine.

This demo is definitely not representative of the applications and games available on the machine at the time.

Well done!