Let’s Talk About TI BASIC on the TI-99/4A

I take a look at TI BASIC for the TI-99/4A. How it's different, how it got that way, what it can do when put to good use, and what the TI-99 community has been able to do to make TI BASIC a great language to develop in, in the present day.
#ti994a #retrocomputing

[@klf6992]

Wow! No politics, no problems, just great times!! You have really been working on your transitions and sounds and it sounds and looks great. Thanks as always🏆

[@PixelPedant]

And thanks for the encouragement. The feedback keeps me motivated to keep it up!

[@LordmonkeyTRM]

As a Brit the TI was rarer than hen's teeth so it's a big unknown for me so these videos are a great way to find out more.

[@jamesslick4790]

As an American, I feel ya. I had a Timex Sinclair 2068 (a somewhat "enhanced" ZX-Spectrum with a "better" keyboard aimed at the N.A. Market) Very few Yanks remember that machine! 👍😊👍 I loved that little box!

[@jtsotherone]

another Brit here, weirdly a used TI was my first computer, so much slower than the BBCs at school!

[@PeBoVision]

I can think of no greater use of one's time than to teach a TI to sing Supertramp songs.

[@cbmeeks]

This is where it started for me as well. TI BASIC when I was 9 years old.

[@philstevenson1741]

Rewatching this and enjoying it all over again. Thanks again for all the excellent videos.

[@klf6992]

I used TI Basic as a "power point" to generate talking points for a presentation on generator maintenance and power distribution systems. Most of my guys thought I was using some new software!!!!!

[@RiverRoadRambler]

I bought a TI 99/4 and later a 99/4A. I was in a club with other owners. One of them wrote a nice program that was sort of a Star Wars-type shooting game. It was slow! So he started it with "In a Galaxy far far away, filled with molasses..."

[@davidanalyst671]

well now you gotta send the code to the guy who made this vid.

[@texasnewt]

Ha!

[@murdockscott]

I started on a TSR-80, but the TI99/4a was the first computer I ever had at home. I spent a ton of time in basic. 😀

[@clarksters88]

I recently picked up a TI-99/4A and I’d like to say your videos have been helping me program, see the games available, and understand the computer’s specs and history. Plus, helping me find the mod scene! Thanks so much for the information and please keep up the great work!

[@Ouijawii]

Great video! I've been longing for a video just like this one to jog some of my early childhood memories. Learning basic as a child made it a lot easier to understand and learn any computer language that came out later. I remember copying code from magazines and being amazed at what it could do with just minimal input.

[@dfortaeGameReviews]

Thanks PixelPedant! I really enjoyed this. You did an excellent job (as always)! Brought back a lot of memories of my Mom sitting at the TI-99 typing in magazine games (I was too young to know how at the time).

[@fabricemontupet]

Always pleasant to see your videos about our beloved 99/4A computer. They make good, always definitely get people in a good mood :)

[@jackilynpyzocha662]

I started with this system, as a Christmas gift, 1983. BASIC was fun to program in!

[@jackilynpyzocha662]

Beige!

[@jackilynpyzocha662]

Beige!

[@silitekmodder5681]

Can't wait to get mine working! Been binging all your TI-994a content

[@juanbq67]

I have the pleasure to learn to program in it at school, I created the school computer club to use them on vacations, my game was rescuing parachuters falling to the sea, with a boat, and underwater cannons to make it harder. Speed was a big disappointment but I love that I was able to do it.

[@Duewester]

I learned the value of saving often while programming a Star Trek game from a Compute magazine. Power loss just a few lines short of being done.😥

[@bjbell52]

I really know the pain. My first computer was an Atari 400. The company writing their Basic language sent them the most recent version of Basic to be used ONLY at a computer show. The writers took a week vacation and when they got back, the intended to go through a 2nd round of bug testing only to find that Atari had started manufacturing Basic cartridges using the unfinished version of Basic. It contained a deadly bug where if you deleted a line of code that was exactly 256 bytes long, the computer would freeze up and even hitting the reset button would bring the Atari back. The only thing users could do is a cold boot losing everything who had already typed in. So when writing I kept saving the program every 10 minutes or so.

[@WravTil]

I was one of the designers of games for the 99/4a some 40+ years ago in TI Bedford. I came up with the idea for 5-a-side Indoor Soccer, but the bosses weren't convinced (or didn't understand) how it would work with 1 player controlled and the others moved by the computer, so I wrote a demo version in TI Basic. This was then rewritten (and improved) in GPL by Bruno Duriez in Nice and was very popular. I wish I still had that bit of code but it disappeared long ago. I also wish that we'd patented the support player movement algorithm because it was entirely novel as far as I know as there were no similar games on the market at the time. Would have made TI millions... I was telling my 8yo grandson about all this yesterday and then found a video of the game (and hence this video) - amazing how slow it is, but best we could do back then. He said to me "Pops, I've learned something new today and I'm very proud of you" :)

[@PixelPedant]

Thanks for sharing the anecdote! And for passing on the story to the next generation. Kids can still learn a lot from these early computers, where the performance and memory cost of every statement needs to be considered, it seems to me.

[@WravTil]

@@PixelPedant Yes, they can. And thanks to you and others for keeping this stuff alive. Rgds Roger

[@eebuckeye]

Another excellent video!

[@BonesFPV]

Great video. Thank you.

[@ronhutcherson9845]

Thanks, I loved it! I wish I knew some of those details back in the 80s. Still, I got a lot out of my system - especially after adding the PEB, disk drive, and printer. And Extended BASIC, of course.

[@Grobi60]

I bought my TI 99/4A in 1982. The Extended BASIC Module was great!

[@andrewlong462]

Just found this video. In 8th grade (1985ish), we were required to do a Social Studies Fair project. I chose Libya (timely back then). Along with writing a report, I wrote a program in BASIC on my TI-99/4A to draw a map of Libya on the screen by redefining characters. I carted in my computer, cassette player, and an old, small, black & white tv to the school library and got it set up and running. I ended up getting 2nd place! But the next day, in class, the teacher told them class I did a good job, but I did not cite the source for the map. I was crestfallen. I told him I wrote the program myself, but he never believed me.

[@PixelPedant]

Great anecdote. Thanks for sharing it. The teacher really should have given you credit for the creativity instead of niggling over technicalities!

[@8_Bit]

I learned a lot! I didn't know those cartridges actually extended TI BASIC in addition to their more obvious functions. Coincidentally I just finished a video about TI BASIC (specifically, typing in and improving a short sketching program from a book) that'll release tomorrow.

[@PixelPedant]

Nice! Crazy we landed on this subject at just about the same time.

[@DanDrolett]

TI-99/4A was my first PC. Bought it on sale for 99 bucks when I was 19 (let's just say that was a few years ago). Didn't get much into the BASIC language beyond a few essential commands. Sadly the computer was ripped off when my house was broken into a year later. By that time TI had stopped manufacturing them. Wouldn't mind having one today just to play with and learn the old coding.

[@eyeprod3101]

Nice video, thanks. I had one of these as a kid. I tried some programming of text based adventure games. I don't remember much, but they're good memories.

[@Nikioko]

TI BASIC is the first programming language I learned when I was 8. And I learned it just from the manual.

[@Eurobunneh]

I started on TI basic and still know it, and still have my TI.

[@davidclausen4271]

That was my first PC in middle school, we typed in the basic code, then it lit up the screen back in 1986. The keyboarding class as it was called. We got the code or commands from a ring binder.

[@AngryCalvin]

Phoenix was one of my favorite arcade cabinets back in the day. Really cool to see it done with TI Basic. Taitos answer to Namcos Galaxia. Even with a mothership boss level. So many possibilities. I only had 3 arcade ports on my TI99 back in the day which were Donkey Kong, Congo Bongo, and Burgertime. Mr Bojangles was one of the TI Basic programs I finished from the manual. Did not have a disk drive so TI Basic was not so great as I could not save anything. Besides I was only about 7-8 years old when I was messing around with it.

[@jensBendig]

The TI 99, my very first own computer. Yes it was slow. But the TI still is charming for me.

[@JosipRetroBits]

Very informative video! Btw. I saw 999 subs, so I subscribed for 1k. Congrats!

[@pianodave3]

Love these videos. Started with TI BASIC when I was 10. Wrote a phone book app with a neat, memory efficient (but slow) sorting routine - didn't even know at the time that I was doing a modified Bubble sort. By the time I was 13 I was pretty good with XB, and my friend Chris and I wrote a game we called Tunnels. Taught myself some trig to get the starfield to "roll", then took it out because I ran out of memory coding the rest of the game! Good times.

[@Michael.McShane]

Loved the exploration into what was basical(ly) my first foray into a personal computer. One of my favorite programs I wrote was the entire song from the wizard of Oz. lol. I loved the three voice chip and even wrote the popular solo from elp's. Lucky man. I graduated from the limitations of ti basic, extended basic and its idiot step children mini memory and the editor assembler package, to a regular IBM PC running ibm basic and Microsoft basic. (That sound chip in the 99/4a kicked the original IBM PC's butt!) from there I went to cobol and rpg III on a S/38 and an AS/400. Ahhh, good times. I still miss my 99/4a and it’s 30 pound peripheral cabinet with that 300 baud modem.

[@stefgrino13013]

really interesting, thanks !!

[@richardtwyning]

I was amazed when I first got the TE-II cartridge and the text to speech available in BASIC, but I did later get the Text-to-Speech software for Extended BASIC. Thank you for this video. The 99/4A was such an underestimated machine, even by TI themselves!

[@SprocketGames]

More TI video goodness. 👍

[@netstreamer1]

I typed in an old interactive fiction game about pirates. Took an age and a half to fix all of the syntax errors and get it to run and since I hadn't figured out how to save to cassette yet by that point it was all lost when I turned off the machine. Lots of fun times though, honestly very much miss those days of computing.

[@capnrob97]

I bought one back in the day when they were on clearance at JC Penney for $49. May have to pick one up on eBay for old times sake.

[@mikelunsford7462]

Great video again. I would spend hours writing in basic and figure it's time for bed after accidentally pressing function equal. So paying attention to the keyboard was high on my list of things to watch.

[@reydas8500]

Thanks for your great video that brings back a lot of memories. My parents offered me a TI99 4A when I was 8 years old because it was on discount st that time. I started programming by buying books. Then using codes from the famous French magazine Hebdogiciel. Then I began to build more ambitious things, and the extended basic I got for my birthday was like holy grail : I could design and move sprites ! The revolution !! I remember learning English alone in my room, with a dictionary late at night at the age of 10 just to be able to read more books about programming. All my family was happy to see each of my stupid mini games and they were pretty sure I would become a computer game creator when I would reach adulthood. Alas ... I am very grateful for your wonderful video. It was like time travel for me :)

[@PixelPedant]

Thanks for sharing your story. Quite a few of the best TI BASIC programs we got in the long run were from France, Germany, and the UK. So you weren't alone in soldiering on trying to make the most of this oddball BASIC dialect, far from its homeland. And these days, the TI-99 community is a lot richer for the fact that connecting with those folks is so much easier, on Zoom and Discord and forums and all the luxuries of the modern Internet.

[@reydas8500]

@@PixelPedant I'll make sure to check you other videos. Keep up the good work :D

[@jamesslick4790]

New Sub! I haven't touched an actual TI-99/4a in decades, But I loved that system. I recently got an emulator and have been playing some carts (from roms) I was addicted to Yahtzee in the day, Picked up the habit up again! LOL. Going to be "binge watching" your channel! 👍😊👍

[@PixelPedant]

Have fun! Always great to hear from someone getting back into the TI-99 after all these years. Good memories worth revisiting, I hope. :)

[@prodos8]

This machine was my family's first computer.

[@stevejennings3960]

New subscriber here… really good video and always have been excited for the TI 8bit computer as a commodore 16 and Commodore 64 user here from the uk

[@PixelPedant]

Always delighted to hear about folks from the Commodore camp exploring the TI world! TI sure didn't get the exposure Commodore machines did, especially on the UK side. But these days, I like to think our little 16-bitter is a hell of a lot of fun to explore.

[@galier2]

Nice.

[@CriticalThinker08]

i got this computer for xmas as a kid and had a lot of fun with it. i learned some BASIC and used to program graphics code as well hoping to design my own baseball game. a cassette recorder i also used to download simple games via audio. i played it on a 19" color tv. as it was a bargain bin clearance computer, the games were dirt cheap as well so i had some cartridges too. what a trip if i had stuck with that machine and learned pc data entry and language programming i think my life would have gone a lot differently. maybe in another universe, lol.

[@davidanalyst671]

Parsec was one of my favorite games as a kid. But as soon as I got one of these, all my friends had graduated to Kingdom of Kroz on the PC. It would be kinda funny if you wrote kingdom of Kroz on a BASIC like this. For the time, it would be like running supermario on your PC.

[@allanmailer4540]

TI BASIC wasn't the worst by a long stretch but it was seriously hampered by the architecture of the machine. Hard to believe that no real hi-res graphics provision was in there and anything remotely hi-res had to be acheived by using loads of CALL CHAR commands. I have 'The Missing Link' on catridge and it really does make things a lot easier. I've been going through a load of old magazines lately and there did seem to be quite a few cassette titles available in the US that utilised the Mini Memory module, it would be great to see a feature on those.

[@Viktory2k1]

Wow! I grew up with the TI and remember well trying to use the basic to run the programs from the back of magazines. Not alot of them worked. I have 2 of them now and a PB box and alot of software but didnt know about all the Tunnels of Doom games.

[@bjbell52]

My first professional program was writing an animated video game for Softside Magazine in Basic (for the Atari).

[@jamesslick4790]

I got REALLY good on TI-BASIC back in the 80s. Yeah, it's WEIRD vs. most Microsoft BASICS. (but NOT as odd as Sinclair BASIC,LOL) I was an adult at the time, with some experience with other computers, so at least I wasn't disillusioned by the limitations. Extended BASIC "upped" the fun with a Speech Synth BIG TIME. Getting a computer to say (NSFW) stuff that your kid brother could only DREAM of from his "Speak & Spell", LOL.

[@kenberlin]

My dad bought me a TI-99 4a when I was in 7th grade in 1985. We were required to take Apple iie basic programming at school. The differences in basic drove me nuts, some similar, some different. I have subsequently learned TI basic was an editor language. That is, it tried to make more granular programming tasks easier. Sprites and HCHAR commands are examples I think. The trade of was an interface to translate ti99 basic to the actual basic running board n the background.

[@sylvainmathieu1386]

back in the 80's i wrote a lottery analisys program

[@dyscotopia]

I remember coding a very blocky approximation of ET moving horizontally across the screen. Well, moving might be overstating it. He smeared across the screen since I couldn't figure out how to remove the blocks drawn by the prior loop. 40 years later I'm pretty sure I could do it.

[@pauldemelto6650]

I love your videos. Any chance you could provide some support with Midi Master for TI 99 4A?

[@PixelPedant]

I have not played with Midi Master, but I could see it in my future at some point. Sound/Music on the TI99 is one of my long term interests.

[@rifter0x0000]

The age of type in programs was great for young users and programmers. Especially because you could get "free" games (included with a magazine). Often, magazines would have multiple versions of said games for different systems, which made it easier on people but also gave a window into differences in interpreters. If a magazine didn't have your machine's version of BASIC listed, you'd have to port it yourself, but lots of people did. I remember having a book which provided a choose your own adventure style text adventure game about trying to find evidence on a Russian spy. Most games were action arcade games for obvious reasons, but this one got past the limitations by including a bunch of blind alleys and having the order of the story scrambled in the code. I remember it used the "data" command extensively as well. If you really tried you could follow it manually, but the idea was if you just typed it in the order it was written the answers wouldn't be too immediately obvious and you could still enjoy the game. The first version I used of the Eliza program was a BASIC version, too. Ski games were a common programming exercise and there were lots of ways to improve a simple one over time. But I think one of the most innovative and enjoyable games I ever typed in was a game called "Hit or Miss." Hit or Miss was similar to Breakout and other brick smasher games. The difference was there was a wall on the bottom as well as the top of the screen- sort of. The "wall" was created from highlighted text, which alternated between "hit" and "miss." If it said hit, the ball would ricochet as normal. If it said "miss" the ball passed through it. As normal, losing a ball was the equivalent of losing a life in that balls were limited. It was a nice change-up, and quite enjoyable. I never had much access to a TI, but my school had Apple computers so I was able to do it there.

[@airshackretro8551]

I do recall having to convert most type-in games from Microsoft BASIC to TI (Dartmouth) BASIC. Of course TI used Dartmouth BASIC since it was published in 1964 as freeware.

[@baladinbaladin2549]

Mon premier ordinateur j avais que le basic avec ma première machine à calculer TI 30

[@musicdad]

I have been looking everywhere for that ti trek. What do I have to do to get a copy?

[@PixelPedant]

Just noticed your question belatedly. If you haven't managed to come by a copy of TI Trek yet, you can find one here: pixelpedant.com/TI-TREK.DSK Note that while it is a disk program with a supporting speech synth file, the program will run fine from cassette or type-in use. It just won't have the speech synth, since that's in the separate speech file on the disk.

[@RLN268]

What is the make/model of the headset/boom mic you are using for this video? I need to buy a headset like that. Great video! I had one of those TI beasts back in 1982. I bought the 99 4/A in spring of 1982 and taught myself BASIC from the blue manual included. That is what started my IT career. 42 yrs later...I'm thinking about retirement as a software developer/database developer.

[@PixelPedant]

I've been using Audio-Technica dynamic boom mics/monitors for the past few years, as I don't have an ideal recording environment, really, and they're good for isolating vocals. So currently, an Audio-Technica BPHS2. Which is used a lot in sports broadcasting, where commentators are recording in a semi-open space surrounded by human cacophony, which is to say, in the worst recording conditions imaginable.

[@martindejong3974]

The biggest problem I see is that your BASIC code has to be stored in the only RAM storage a TI99/4 has, namely the VRAM, but if you use VRAM then it WILL conflict with it video capabilities, that is why it is destined to exclusively use a video mode that uses the least amount of VRAM, which is text mode! Also because the (tokenised I presume) BASIC code resides in VRAM the BASIC interpreter has to use the limited speed I/O interface to the TMS9918A, which also slows down the speed of execution. I'm not sure how the 8-bit interpreter fits into this story, perhaps you can explain this a little better.

[@lbanting]

I think I still prefer to go nostalgic with Commodore computers. But great video though. It certainly has given me a really cool insight about a platform that I never went into. I just may play with emulators! Thanks for a great video!

[@PixelPedant]

Thanks! If you feel inclined to give it a try, I'd suggest the Classic99 emulator. Very easy to use on a basic level, with core software built in, but also has nice debugging features if you do want to dig into the nitty gritty.

[@lbanting]

@@PixelPedant Thanks for the suggestion! I'll give it a goo this weekend!

[@robertstephens9933]

As a TI-99/4A enthusiast, I love your in-depth videos and analysis. Question: I’m writing some simple programs and I want to add a comment to my code. Is there a command for this in TI Basic or character instruction as in javascript? i.e // what follows the forward slashes is a comment

[@PixelPedant]

REM is the customary BASIC comment prefix, for full-line comments, and is used in TI BASIC in the conventional way. i.e., 10 REM THIS LINE IS A COMMENT. In Extended BASIC, comments may also be appended to the end of any line by preceding them with an exclamation mark. i.e., 10 PRINT "HELLO" ! THIS LINE PRINTS HELLO. It must be noted that many BASIC programs of this era are not commented extensively, as this is an era of severe memory limitations, wherein the 40 bytes for a comment line are often an inexcusable imposition.

[@robertstephens9933]

@@PixelPedant Thanks for the explanation. Yes that is why I never have seen as it would chew up quite a bit of the precious memory

[@matthewweng8483]

So true - I was shattered the day I realized that my grandiose plan for coding ‘Aztec’ in either Basic on my 994a was never going to happen… heh, traumatized is the perfect word for it.

[@KineticSkeptic]

It was definitely slow. I wrote a Frogger program using TI basic. It worked but it was pretty slow. I still have the program saved on the original cassette tape.

[@amonster8mymother]

I tried it and I couldnt get it to work. ❤

[@blainegwen4858]

they had to go out of their way to exclude peekv and pokev in TI basic // my guess is the purpose of limiting the vdp access and quality of TI basic programs was to have software not comparable to the profitable sales of cartridges~~

[@CarbonicHolyPally]

What about BASIC SUPPORT MODULE?

[@johnsimon8457]

7:56 GPL basic is a lot more compact than machine code? That’s wild. I’m realizing that the Microsoft integer basic on the apple II is pretty bare bones, having to do peeks to click a pc speaker instead of calling sound()

[@PixelPedant]

Yeah, GPL makes various complex processes exceedingly compact. Like a keyboard scan is just a one byte token (as it is an 8-bit virtual machine). So for compactness, there's no competing with that, in 16-bit machine code.

[@kenberlin]

Reminds of python now with the graphics add on

[@kenberlin]

Bottom line is that it slowed everything down. I wrote the same video game in Apple and in TI and the game action sucked on the TI. But, I still love TI basic. They created an enhanced basic cartridge that improved things somewhat with sub routines and graphics.

[@BryanChance]

Ok there's a command called "OLD" LOL ;-/ These 80's computers are neat though.

[@therealxunil2]

I have this ridiculous notion of building a basic ANSI C compiler for the 99. Why? who the hell knows. I just wanna

[@davidanalyst671]

Okay, but how many voices does python have built-in??? But thats the language everyone wants to talk about

[@TheArmchairrocker]

Yeah TI basic was pretty limited. Extended.Basic was better. You could make decent (for the times) games with it. I made a few games with it including a pretty good Frogger version back in 1984.

[@JxH]

"GPL more compact than assembler." Hmmm... That statement depends on pedantry to be true.

[@mibnsharpals]

Yes, the TI99(/a) is an example of how you can ruin a design. 1. Take a 16-bit CPU that even allows multitasking, just by changing the workplace register. All other registers were in RAM!!! And connect it to an 8Bit video chip and transfer all data through it. To make it worse, don't write the basic interpreter directly in machine code, but develop a VM that can execute bytecode. What the computer can do becomes visible when you install the 32k RAM expansion and start a reasonable basic. Well, a fast Z80 or 6502 could still outpace him. But when it came to multiprogram execution, the TMS was superior. The CPU is actually a smaller version of a MINI computer (no, not a very small computer, but the performance was above the micro. )

[@cathrynm]

'OLD' to load a basic program? That's pretty weird.

[@8_Bit]

Yes, it's very unusual, though it sort of makes sense as the opposite of NEW. I just loaded from cassette on my TI-99/4A for the first time yesterday, and the command is "OLD CS1". It took a while to find the correct command; the book I have had no index entry for "load" at all, and the text indexed by "cassette" just described physically hooking up the cassette drive, and not actually how to load something. So I actually had to look through the BASIC chapter in the book, command by command, until I found OLD.

[@dgro949]

No more weird than 'awk' or 'grep'.

[@wolfgangschreurs8700]

I feel someone should upload the code listings in the magazines of the time. Perhaps to Internet Archive. It seems very hard to find these days. My father used to have many magazines of the Dutch TI-GG magazine "Tijdingen", but I believe we lost them all at some point, sadly ... In the future this piece of computer history could be gone and that would be a sad thing indeed (at least to me).

[@PixelPedant]

Unfortunate that those magazines went missing. We've done fairly well preserving the major English, German and Italian language TI-99 materials/publications. But I expect a Dutch UG publication hasn't done quite as well in that department.

[@TedSeeber]

Dartmouth Basic.

[@drefk1973]

Can you try to be a litte more uncharistmatic next time? WTH, so wooden. KZbin really isn't for everyone

[@kenberlin]

I am a Ti99 basic disciple. Love it, even though it is slow.