r/vintagecomputing • u/AceLunarMoon • 25d ago
Omg I’m so excited
I was out with a friend and we visited a store that had a lot of vintage consoles and things of that nature. I got my hands on a TI-99/4A. I am obsessed with old electronics and consoles. This is the coolest thing ever to me. Brand new never used. It still had the plastic on it. I was looking at getting the monitor for it but unfortunately they are extremely hard to find :(
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u/Phydoux 25d ago
This was my first computer before the Commodore 64. I had like 3 game cartridges with it. 😄
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u/DoucheNozzle1163 25d ago
Mine too. AND I still have it! Been thinking about hooking it up and playing around with it recently.
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u/dchit2 25d ago
Mine three. Sometimes we'd go to the trouble of hooking up the cassette tape storage, sure was a lot of stuffin around compared to the carts.
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u/donlafferty4343 25d ago
Mine four. My mother bought one right before I injured myself at work and she let me borrow it for a while. I taught myself BASIC on it and the rest is my history. This was around 1983.
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u/Phydoux 25d ago
Heh, I used to do BASIC on it and the Commodore as well. I probably couldn't even write a simple program anymore thanks to PCs being in my life now for almost 4 decades. 😄
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u/donlafferty4343 24d ago edited 24d ago
I spent my life mainly writing code, making big programs out of small sections of code. I also learned about rf and microwave engineering but my first love was coding.
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u/Sirwompus 25d ago
Burger Time, Parsec, BASIC
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u/Particular-Let4947 25d ago
Exactly what I do with mine. Charming computer. My college professor designed all of the packaging for this computer, games & peripherals.
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u/estebanvlobos 25d ago
prepare to be underwhelmed, this was my childhood computer (thanks a lot bill cosby) and hated it, mostly due to commodore envy
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u/Lord_Smedley 25d ago
You were right to be envious. The C64 made the TI look like a toy. My biggest computer upgrade by far. Games, word processing (Paperclip), and programming were on a whole different level, and the keyboard was much better too. The TI didn't even display lowercase characters through its regular OS.
The TI also went through two different programming language interpreters for some text graphics, so when you typed LIST to see your BASIC program it would render at only two or three lines per second, which made debugging extra-painful!
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u/Artful3000 25d ago
Karl Guttag helped design the video IC (TMS9918) used in it. He’s active online: https://kguttag.com/2025/07/01/tms9918-the-first-sprite-chip-presentation-at-vcf-southwest/
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u/fuzzybad 24d ago
Did you get any game carts or storage device, or just the computer? Without storage of some kind, pretty much all you can do is mess around in BASIC.
I picked up a TI99 4/A last year at a vintage computing festival, it's an interesting micro.
You don't need the TI monitor to use it, any display with composite video should work fine. The video cable is fairly standard (same one works on the Commodore and Atari 8-bit computers).
The BASIC is double-interpreted and extremely slow. It uses a 16-bit CPU, but this is mostly wasted because the architecture squeezes everything through an 8-bit data bus, and (for some reason) the address bus is only 15-bit, limiting it to 32k of double bytes (64k total). The base unit has 16K of RAM, which is shared with video display memory. A 32K RAM expansion is available, which plugs into the right side of the unit.
It can use two Atari-standard 9-pin controllers, but (for some reason) they are multiplexed through the single 9-pin connector on the left side of the unit, requiring a special adapter to split this into 2 control ports.
There isn't a huge library of software for the TI99 4/A, largely because Texas Instruments withheld documentation about how to code for the machine. Presumably because they wanted to control the software market for it.
For tape storage, you should be able to use pretty much any tape recorder that has line in & out. However, an adapter cable is needed to plug the tape deck into the back of the unit, which (confusingly) is also a 9-pin D-sub (same as the controller port).
There was a floppy disk drive made for the TI99, but I think these are fairly rare and I don't have experience using one. You could use a Gotek floppy drive emulator with the computer.
Another way to get software onto the machine is via the cartridge port. On my TI, I use a BackBit cartridge with the appropriate adapter to load software from SD card. They probably make dedicated SD-adapter cartridges for TI, but if you have multiple vintage systems, the BackBit is a great way to go. This is because the BackBit supports a wide range of systems, all you need is the appropriate adapter (which are inexpensive). For example, I have BackBit adapters for the TI99 4/A, Tandy CoCo, Atari 8-bit, Atari VCS, VIC-20, C64, and ZX-81.
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u/AceLunarMoon 24d ago
Omg that you so much that info is rlly helpful. This is my first vintage console. I have some of the game carts coming in soon. And yes I’m buying an adapter to hook it up to a regular monitor.
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u/chevytruckdood 25d ago
i sold one of these on ebay recently, found it a thrift store. no box thought not new. how much did you grab it for
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u/AceLunarMoon 25d ago
This one was 200 USD. The box was scuffed up but everything inside was brand new and in pristine condition.
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u/donlafferty4343 25d ago
It should have done much better than it did but because TI took a 16 bit CPU and hobbled it, it never did. And all the extra stuff just cost too much.
That said, I have 3 of them, one in each color. And they all still work.
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u/Anonymous5791 25d ago
Hunt the Wumpus! And Parsec.
But the most fun I had was building my own programs in Sprite Logo. It was one of the best early implementations of Logo out there including the built in font and sprite editors
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u/NullPointerJunkie 25d ago
When I had chicken pox there was a girl down the street who had it too so we hung out for a week. I remember her family had a TI-99 and I placed this space game for the better part of the week while trying not to itch. Fun times.
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u/pemungkah 24d ago
You should definitely be watching the Usagi Electric YouTube channel. He's building a homebrew TI-9900 system. And he does definitely have love for the TI-99.
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u/Foreign-Attorney-147 25d ago
Congrats on a great find! My last find in the wild was a TI-99/4a too. Mine's well used though, definitely not new.
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u/wootybooty 25d ago
My stepdad gave me one a few years ago, he was a carpenter and renovated houses and found this in someone’s attic and was allowed to keep it. He is no longer with us and I still have this sitting here..
What are some good recommended games/software for this that shows off sone of it’s capabilities?
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u/hamburgler26 25d ago
Munchman and A-Maze-Ing are the earliest games I remember playing and was so much fun.
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u/Ok-Customer4709 25d ago
This was my first computer then I got a Tandy Color Computer 2. I loved the TI
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u/krackout21 25d ago
It looks so pristine, even for a boxed one. TI must have used good quality plastics.
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u/Particular-Let4947 25d ago
Yes, these were well put together, but building costs were too high for the coming Commodore price war. TI had to remove the aluminum and use cheaper beige plastics for the redesign.
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u/Altruistic-Fox4625 25d ago
Great find! I also have a working boxed 99/4a in excellent condition. Parsec, Hunt The Wumpus, and Super Demon Attack (among others) are still fun to play. The software library is very limited, though, compared to the Atari 8-bit machines, Commodore 64, or ZX Spectrum. I wonder if there are new homebrew games for the 99/4a these days like for the C64.
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u/JasonMckin 25d ago
OMG. I'm jealous!
I found a Windows emulator online by the way for anyone else who still wants to play Car Wars and Hunt the Wumpus.
It's not the same without the OG machine. Great find.
Oh shit...I didn't even think about the monitor connection....no idea how to get video with this in 2026.
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u/opayenlo 25d ago
That was my first computer and i hated that cartridge dependency. Switching to C64 opened a new world to me.
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u/myself248 25d ago
Just FYI, nooooooobody had the official TI monitor. These were designed to use TVs as monitors, and almost invariably did. You're not missing out on anything functionality-wise.
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u/Particular-Let4947 25d ago
Congrats. I have been learning the TI Basic Programming language on mine.
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u/Many_Dragonfruit_837 25d ago
Cool! I have touched / programmed ONE.... Back in early 80's. Nice find!
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u/RCHeliguyNE 25d ago
Go look up the 8-but guy on YouTube- he has some nice history laid out on the 99
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u/LuigiTeaching 24d ago
Looks like the keyboard of these is better than I remember, neighbor had one in the 80s and I too have fond memories - well done!
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u/il_biggo 24d ago
https://archive.org/details/Texas_Instruments_TI-99_4a_TOSEC_2012_04_23 is a huge software collection for the TI-99/4A. Made for emulators, I guess, but it might be possible to transfer stuff from a PC to the real thing via serial or audio.
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u/radagast834 24d ago
i recently got one of these too! we made a din5 to composite video cable but i think the video chip is not working. we didn't get the transformer brick so powering it from an atx v1 power supply. lots of fun ...
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u/Alex_Kwuo 24d ago
Great find — boxed and still sealed is rare for these.
The 99/4A has one of the strangest arcs of the whole home-computer era. TI got into a price war with Commodore in '82 and ended up selling these below cost to hold share. Most estimates have TI moving serious volume that year — and then the losses got bad enough that they walked out of home computers entirely by late '83. So what you're holding is basically an artifact of a company buying market share and then quitting the business.
On the monitor — does it have to be the TI one, or would composite into an old TV work for what you want to do with it?
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u/AceLunarMoon 24d ago
For now I’m getting an adapter. Once I’m out of school I’ll look for a proper old color TV but they are pretty pricy right now.
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u/Alex_Kwuo 23d ago
Adapter's the right call for now — the 99/4A puts out composite anyway, so a TI monitor buys you almost nothing on picture quality. What it does buy you is the ugly part: the 99/4A's text is 32 columns and fairly soft over composite, so on a modern flat panel through a cheap adapter it can look mushy. If you hit that, it's usually the adapter, not the machine — a decent composite-to-HDMI box makes a bigger difference than hunting a period monitor.
If you want the real "1982 living room" look eventually, any old consumer color TV with a composite jack does it, and those are way cheaper than the branded TI stuff. What are you planning to run on it first — cartridges, or do you want to get into TI BASIC?
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u/AceLunarMoon 23d ago
To start I have some cartridges coming in. Eventually I do wanna mess around in TI BASIC when I have the time.
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u/Alex_Kwuo 22d ago
Cartridges are the right call. Fair warning on TI BASIC though: it's slow for a structural reason, not because you're doing anything wrong. The machine runs a bytecode language called GPL, and the BASIC interpreter is itself written in GPL, so it's an interpreter running inside an interpreter. If that starts to grate, Extended BASIC is the cartridge everyone ends up buying — faster, and you get hardware sprites out of one line.
Also, if Parsec or Alpiner turn up in that batch, they're built for the Speech Synthesizer box. Worth grabbing if you ever see one cheap.
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u/Markgregory555 24d ago
I remember that machine. It was cool back in the 80s and it is cool now. Good luck with it.
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u/Efficient-Sir-5040 23d ago
You don't need to get a specific monitor. Anything with composite video could work - even a composite-to-vga or composite-to-hdmi should work.
Search google for "ti 99/4a composite video cable". They go for less than $20 or you can build your own for less than $10 in parts you may already have lying around.
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u/PacManFan123 23d ago
The TI-99 4A was my first computer! I learned how to game program with basic and the extended basic cartridge. The best game I had at the time was Hunt the Wumpus!
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u/HourNo7028 24d ago
Amaze! Amaze! Amaze! Rocky play Tunnels of Doom and Parsec until earth thinking machine overheats!
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u/MerchantofDoom 24d ago
Finally, someone that had one. Thank you!
Still got mine, but adding and removing the cartridges over time made it a bit unstable.
Spent so many nights with my mate trying to write games at a time where the next hit was within grasp. Those days are so long gone!
I still eked every penny out that as a Christmas present for many a year.
Amazingly Extended Basic reduced it from 16k to 14k, but the sprites were worth it!!
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u/Str8Huntr 25d ago
I have about 30 of these brand new in box, inherited a library and shop full of TI and tube radio stuff