TI994a Music Box Video

Here is a blast from the past! In the early 1980's my sister and I got a Texas Instruments TI994a computer for Christmas. This was our first computer ever, and we were pretty excited to start to learn how to program it. After many months of fiddling around, this was our crowning glory.

My sister learned how to program music on the computer, and I learned how to do graphics. Almost all of the work here is my sisters. She did all the main program typing, which is over 400 lines of code. I added the graphics to the beginning. So this is what we did in 1983 for fun. That feels like such a world apart. Boy has technology come a long way!

To make this video I found an old audio cassette tape that had the original program on it. I then found online a conversion program that could read the tape file and convert it to text. There are quite a few TI994a emulators online, so I just chose one that could input text and voila! After nearly 27 years, here is the original program in its full glory!

Enjoy :)

Gotta love that 8-bit mono computer sound :P

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Texas
• Instruments
• TI
• TI994a
• 994a
• 1983
• Computer
• Music
• Box
• BASIC
• 8-bit
• program

[TerrorNoctus]

I had the same machine.

I didn't have the splash screen, but I programmed "Wipeout" by the ventures. I remember being excited that I found a noise generator function when I was learning about the TI.

How painful it was to sit there and enter line by line and note by note "Call sound (440,100,2)"

for pitch, duration and volume. Being polyphonic was lucky, though, you could do 3 and four note chords. WOW !

:)

Cool stuff!

[DukeNukeIt]

Boy, if you could dig up the original cassette tape, I could transfer it! If I remember correctly, all the music line code was entered by my sister. One line at a time... I'm sure it took her days if not weeks to do, then she had to debug the program :P

I'm still amazed that I was able to find this and recreate it. I guess old data never dies!

[dogfarts888]

Pretty cool. Those early computers sure were fun... and programming them was something pretty much anyone could do.