I just started playing tunnels of doom on an emulator, for the ti 99/4a computer system, because it brought back memories. Apparently, there were a lot of third-party (by asgard) quests made for the game, although the only ones that came with it were pennies quest and quest for the king. Pennies quest was a no-monster quest, kind of like a tutorial I guess, or something for kids to play, while quest for the king was the real game.

Tunnels of doom came out in 1982, and it used a cartridge for the main engine and either cassette tapes or diskettes for the quest and save files. It's kind of like wizardry or as far as the 3d traveling and has a battle system kind of like the old ultima games.

Out of the hundreds of games I use to have for the ti/99 4a, I believe most of them, even as roms, will probably never see the light of day. Although the computer systems were very popular, most people didn't have the disk drives, and a lot of the disk software seems to have disappeared.

Even looking around at atari 400/600/800/xl/xe roms, I see that there aren't many disk images out there, despite me at one time having hundreds of games on diskettes.

Anyway, I've just been reminiscing about all of the games out there, and I see that there are compact flash devices and/or serial/usb to pc devices for the ti, atari computers, commodore 64, etc.

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a ti/99 4a emulator for the xbox or ps2, which sucks, because it would be nice to have all the functionality of them in one device. There are atari computer emulators on the xbox, but I'm not sure how much compatibility there are. I did order an xbox to usb cable last night though, to try to see which ones will work with a keyboard.

Anyway, another thing that kind of interests me is these flash drives and stuff. Someone apparently makes a ti/99 mini-peb (peripheral expansion box) that has the rs-232 port, emulates 3 disk drives, and it also has the 32k ram upgrade in it. It's also suppose to be compatible with the speech synthesizer. Every once in awhile, they are on ebay.

compact flash drive

I was also looking at getting a commodore 64 again and an atari computer, but they've went up a bit too high. I hardly ever see them at flea markets or yard sales any more, but I'd love to get one of the commodore 128 systems with the keyboard split away from the original base.

Commodore 128d

I believe one of the worst parts about the commodore 64, probably the 128 as well, is that no one could evercome the slow serial port it had for reading disks. There were many fastboot carts out there. They worked on some games and apps but froze on others. There just never was a good alternative.

I'd love to get another adam computer as well. I think the worst part about those systems were that they had to use the printer, because it supplied the power and such to the computer. Costs could have probably been cut in half at launch, and it may have actually had better success without it.

Ahh the C64, one of the few systems to have a karate kid game!

It must be really tough to find software for stuff that old, without having to worry about its fidelity to the real thing. Reminds me of all these old school game system clones that companies are putting out these days. Somehow, at least one feature will be slightly off, no matter how advanced the emulation technology is. I also saw this with NESticle and ZSNES, and they're considered the best emulators for their respective consoles.

Every once in awhile, I wonder why I haven't created a dedicated emulator/pc system. I built on many years back temporarily just to see how it functioned and all, even made an SNES to PC adapter for it.





I probably uploaded these pics here years ago, but this was how I played my SNES games! I used an parallel mount and cable, an old SNES clear plastic case, and two real SNES joystick ports. Even the red power light worked on it! That's how I played my snes emulators! It was a very old-skool design but worked very well in the win 98 era.

I suppose one of the biggest hurdles I've had with setting up a dedicated emulator pc is because of the blurry composite and s-video outputs most video cards seem to have. Some are better than others.

Maybe one day!

Well, I did find one of the world's smallest mini itx cases, the m350.

My Webpage

This case can be installed on a vesa mount, connected to the back of your lcd tv or monitor where it can't even be seen, or it can be mounted with a wall mount.

I think one of the biggest hurdles, if Iwanted to go with a dos-based system is the lack of dos sound drivers for the itx boards.

Now that I've ordered a cf7+ for my ti-99/4a, my ti computers don't work any more!