About

I’m a vintage computer enthusiast and programmer. One of the last from an era where budding young programmers got their training from magazines like Compute! and Byte.

My first computer was, not surprisingly, the TI-99/4a. My parents decided a computer would be a nice thing to get for the family, since they were so cheap at the time in 1984. They decided they would get a TI for these reasons:

  • It was cheap. Only $250 from Jafco, with a $100 rebate and if you turned in six UPC’s from six cartridges, you got a free speech synthesizer
  • They liked and trusted Texas Instruments products; we had both a Speak n’ Math and Speak n’ Spell unit that were quite cool
  • They had NO idea the home computer division at TI was shut down and that they were essentially buying an orphaned system

When I was young, I dreamed of a lot of games I wanted to write on the computer. It took me a few years to master BASIC (including one embarrassing typo that I assumed was a broken piece of software for nearly a year; my parents never let me forget that) but assembly language was a esoteric weird language of cabalistic proportions. It didn’t help matters that I didn’t have a lot of good resources available; three books on the assembly language, one of them a massive incredibly user-unfriendly reference manual. When I bought a PC in the early 90′s, I packed up my TI to gather dust in the basement.

Years later, while going back to school to get my C.S. degree for a career in software engineering, I dug my TI back out, for some nostalgia trips. The internet offered a great many resources I had lacked, and I found my interest in programming reawakening. But I didn’t want to write stuff for the modern PC… I was still dreaming of those old games, lovingly crafted with colored pencil on reams of graph paper.

My current project for the TI-99/4a is a massive disk-based CRPG, or Computer Role-Playing Game. The TI-99/4a was lacking in games of this genre in the old days, and I’ve always wanted to correct the situation. I started a website to publish articles at first, and while I still maintain that, most of my updates occur here on the blog.

You can visit the main site at: http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg