Greets

For a while now I've had a burning desire to do a version of Manic Miner on the TI-99/4A. There is clearly some masochistic kink in my personality which leads me to do these non-trivial, yet pretty much pointless things.

Then again, why do people climb mountains? For the view? I don't think so. To prove to others that they can do it? Well, I guess there's some of that. But I think most mountain climbers climb simply to prove to themselves that they can do it. I think this is the case with me and this project.

As with most things, I mull these things over in my mind for a long while before I start them. A sort of mental 'batch-job' runs, steadily gathering data over a long period of time, and one day, completely unexpectedly you understand, the batch-job completes and either returns true, or false. In this particular case, the job returned true.

Shit.

So, this blog (I hate blogs. I mean, how sad are blogs? Haven't people got more interesting things to do? I mean get a life for God's sake. Er, yes. Right) will detail the travails of my effort to re-produce Manic Miner on the TI-99/4A. It will also serve as a bloody useful reminder to me about how the code works as it becomes more complex!

For anyone that's interested, the TI-99/4A was produced in the early 80's by Texas Instruments. A 16 bit machine with powerful graphics and sound (for the time) features, including 32 hardware sprites.

Manic Miner was written by a 16 year old in Liverpool by the name of Matthew Smith, who, rather inexplicably it would appear, had no interest in either Dire Straits or girls (I know, I know, go figure) for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The game, a platform game, has garnered legendary cult status*, particularly in Britain, where it sold by the shed load.

Both machines hold fond places in my heart. The TI-99/4A was purchased for me by my step father, who, tired of pulling me out of the local supermarket to come and eat dinner (I was in the computer section of our local Co-Op writing code on the Spectrum's, Vic 20's, C64's, Orics etc and generally trying to teach myself about them) had noticed my fascination, and decided that he ought to encourage this, as 'computers will be the future'.

This would have been 1983. The year TI ceased making the machine. Thatchers Britain, in 1983 was a pretty grim place. The Falklands war had just ended, miners strike about to kick off (IIRC), and three million un-employed. Including my step-father. Despite this, he scrimped, saved, and did odd-jobs to get enough money together to buy a £199 TI-99/4A. We spent hours and hours and hours and hours in front of that machine (plugged into the living-room telly) typing in games from magazines and changing them to see how they worked. Happy days. I learned a lot about BASIC programming.

The 4A was/is a great machine, but it just didn't do well in the UK. The home computer wars were about to kick off, and TI just didn't do a good job of promoting it in the UK. It had a number of problems. The closed architecture of the machines meant it was impossible to harness the power of the machine without the hideously-expensive (and weighty) Peripheral Expansion Box, and it got left behind by the ZX Spectrum and Commodore machine that gave full access to the casual user of all the machines resources. Also, the game cartridges for the 4A, although generally excellent (my school mates sat in awe at Parsec and Alpiner) they required the selling of a body organ, or a short stint dealing in contra-band or arms running to purchase them.

My step-father flogged the TI. Shit. What was I going to do now? My mates had Spectrums, ZX81's, Vics, C64s, and the only thing I had now was a shitty old Philips Videopac (although I wish I still had it!). This was a bad day. He apologised for selling the TI, but said when he had some more money, he'd buy me another computer. Yeah, right.

Christmas 1984. My step-father had got a job as a care-taker at a local shopping mall in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Things were looking up. On that Christmas morning, I ripped the paper off an innocuous looking box to reveal a shiny new Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K.

And it was all mine.

Oh joy of joys. Now I could join the computer elite at school. No longer on the fringes. Instead of listening to my friends tales of rubber-keyed fetishism, I could be one of them. Anyway, sod all that, it meant I could swap cassettes with them on the play ground (we had an Amstrad TS88 tower system that was perfect for tape-to-tape copying!)

The TI was forgotten. I had a Speccy. It didn't get any better than this. I learned BASIC on it, Z80 on it, and played one or two (million) games on it. Bliss.

For some bizarre reason that I'm not really aware of, I bought another TI-99/4A. It would have been around 1998. I can't even remember how or from whom I got the machine. But I stuck with it. I liked using it. I joined the TI UK user group, and started reading TI*MES, their monthly magazine. Before I knew it, I was writing my own articles for the magazine. Oh the fame.

After a getting a full expansion system and tons of software, I eventually sold the lot circa 1997 after buying a PC. A completely dumb move that I've regretted ever since. I had tons of really cool hardware, Ramdisks, the lot. What a twonk.

About three years ago, I re-discovered the TI for the third time via the beauty of emulation. I now get my TI fix via Classic99 and Win994A. The ultimate portable TI. (I also have ZX32, a great Speccy emulator!)

Since then I've been writing assembly language, dabbling here and there. But this is it. The real deal. A big project.

Will I pull it off (ooer, missus, oooh matron etc)? Who knows, stay tuned and find out.

It could be a wild ride, there again it could be like a Sunday drive in a Trabant: A lot of noise, without really going anywhere... Time will tell...

Mark.

* and then some