Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer
A coworker sent this to me, which brought back all kinds of great
memories. We had one of these when I was a kid, and got a lot of use
out of it. We had a bunch of video games for it, like Parsec,
Munchman(PACMAN rip off), and some really bad football game. We also
had the speech synthesiser which was very cool and futuristic. And we
played text adventures with it, but since there was no disk drive on
ours anyway), they were stored on cassette tape. Give it seeming
eternity to load (modem-like sounds emitting from it the whole time),
and you were whisked to some great adventure with no graphics
whatsoever. All my friends had atari 2600's, and I always felt like we
had the knock-off version, but looking back, the TI games were a lot
better than that Atari 2600 crap. Actually, those were some pretty
great games, considering the limited resources available. Hell, even
with the limits, they were better than a lot of crap that you see
today. Great graphics certainly doesn't equal great games.
Speaking of old games, I went to visit my parents this weekend, and my
Dad had hooked up our old Atari 5200. The buttons on that thing really
sucked ass, so we could only play the games that would work with the
trackball, or Space Dungeon, which used two joysticks and no buttons
(and we had to use a paperclip to short out the start button to start
it). I quickly got re-addicted to Space Dungeon, which is a great
game. My brother and I used to play it for hours.
Anyone else have a TI-99/4A, or Atari 5200? If not, what video game
system/PC was the first one you remember using? And if you say
Nintendo, Sega or Playstation, you're too young to participate in this
discussion, so go to your room, because I don't want people making me
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