• indepndnt@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’ll always have a place in my heart for my first computer, the TI-99/4A. (If you really need more than 4k, you can get the 32k expansion!) I eventually progressed to writing programs in 9900 assembly and even sold a few, it was fun.

    • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I got one a few years back. Such a unique machine! The CPU is 16-bit iirc, but the rest of the system is set up as 8-bit. And some kind of strange scheme with shared RAM that makes the whole thing ultimately very slow.

      I never got too far into it since I didn’t have a disk drive for it. I hear there are kits available now, since the originals are somewhat expensive.

      • indepndnt@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yes! They were originally going to use an 8-bit CPU but had to change the design for some reason. It had 64k of addressable memory space, some of which was mapped to I/O and video and whatnot, I’d guess the memory scheme you’re talking about is how it took two clock cycles to read or write a 16-bit data byte on the CPU.