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Don't mess with Texas by Desire [web]
[nfo]
screenshot added by Ramon B5 on 2017-01-29 09:49:37
platform :
type :
release date : january 2017
release party : Synchrony 2017
compo : oldskool demo
ranked : 1st
  • 79
  • 4
  • 0
popularity : 68%
 68%
  • 0.95
alltime top: #984
added on the 2017-01-29 09:49:37 by Ramon B5 Ramon B5

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woah! nice!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 10:02:34 by sensenstahl sensenstahl
Awesome work guys!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 10:19:59 by Triace Triace
Good looking stuff, well done
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 10:31:53 by Corial Corial
Coool
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 10:32:29 by Optimus Optimus
Solid!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 10:36:05 by Soundy Soundy
Whoa, what a demo! So many great effects, so well presented! Never gets boring! Great chiptuntes as well!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 10:51:41 by v3nom v3nom
Excellent! Lots of content on a not-so-commonly-used machine. Highly enjoyable!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 11:47:46 by Sdw Sdw
platform, efforts.
Please replace PC emulator video with real machine, if possible.
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 12:10:44 by frog frog
a very enjoyable oldschool demoshow on an oldschool platform.
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 13:15:42 by MuffinHop MuffinHop
what branch said
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 13:31:50 by noby noby
I'm not familiar with the TI99 specs although I suspect they're not great, but this a very nice demo. Lots of effects, good tunes and nice design and rhythm. Keep making demos! :)
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 13:53:08 by exocet exocet
Great effects and chip!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 15:45:03 by mad mad
great stuff, good song too and nice touch using the speech synth too. Effects and color really reminds me of MSX1, and the "dirtiness" of them too. All and all a great effects show for a famously lacking machine, it almost feels usable seeing this!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 15:51:57 by visy visy
excelent
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 16:01:53 by guyfrost guyfrost
Rocks!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 16:07:04 by Buckethead Buckethead
Well done mates! Deserves 1st.
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 16:18:04 by Heaven/TQA Heaven/TQA
wow excellent!!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 16:38:41 by sINk sINk
Thanks for the kind words all! This was a long time in coming but we are SUPER happy with how it came out. Working on this machine was certainly a challenge but our coders can tell you more about that. The fantastic reception we got when it was presented at the party made it all worthwhile.

Quote:
platform, efforts.
Please replace PC emulator video with real machine, if possible.


Yeah we couldn't get a video capture device to sync to the TI properly and ran out of time. The MAME emulation is "perfect" so the current one is a good reference video, but a hardware cap would be awesome.
added on the 2017-01-29 16:45:32 by jmph jmph
Much work, many fx, nice tunes. Don't know much about TI99 specs - to me looks like MSX1 w/o z80. Considering this, well: great demo!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 17:47:03 by Overflow Overflow
Megademos are bigger in Texas! Fine use of the instrument...
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 17:52:12 by nom de nom nom de nom
Very good, especially the first tune.
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 19:29:00 by Dascon Dascon
Woohooo!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 21:33:15 by Bobic Bobic
you make demos!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 22:43:49 by RufUsul RufUsul
Yay! Demos on less common platforms!

Double yay its a great demo :-)
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 23:04:41 by xeron xeron
9918 glöps and catchy tunes, sprites put to good use also!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 23:15:00 by JAC! JAC!
Good stuff!
rulez added on the 2017-01-29 23:19:03 by sachy sachy
It is fantastic !! thanks !!!!

mine is already on the cartridge :) it is a Must have DEMO !

BB Image
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 00:56:19 by ti99iuc ti99iuc
@ti99uc: Nice! I think that's the third or fourth cartridge in existence. :D

Thought I'd write a little bit up on the genesis of this prod in case you guys are interested. We believe this is the first true demo/megademo on the TI99/4A, ever. Of course you have to be a little strict with the definition of a 'demo' to get that, but hey, it works for us. ;)

In 2014 I was visiting a foreign (to me) city, and found a dusty boxed TI99 in a pawn shop, buried under some hi-fi gear. I didn't buy it at the time, but I looked up if there had ever been a demoscene *anything* on it, and back then found nothing. That got me thinking. About six months later I moved to the same city, visited the same pawn shop, and haggled my way into very cheap TI ownership. At that point I asked Orbitaldecay if he was interested in something on it, and he absolutely was.

The original plan was a musicdisk (naturally my idea) or a simple scroller+effect+tune intro. The soundchip turned out to have a rather steep learning curve for me, and Orby & I were busy with some other prods. But the idea didn't go away. Sometime before @Party 2016, Orby got the ball rolling by getting RamonB5 interested and it was game on.

In the meantime 99tro by Frog got released, as well as some scene-ish but not quite "in the scene" stuff like Happy New Year 2015 by Asmusr (^^ see credits) so it was clear a simple intro would no longer cut it.

Fortunately, Orby and Ramon managed to recruit some of the best active devs on this platform, and once everyone was on board, after almost a year of hard work, here we are. Hopefully the results paid off. I personally am unbelievably proud of this thing, sure it's got a couple rough edges but for a platform first I think we set the bar at a pretty good height. Now the question is, who's gonna be the next challenger? :D

Some fun facts about the platform & this prod:
- We have the same sound & gfx chip as the MSX to work with, and a 16-bit CPU. That's awesome right? Well, the CPU is slow (3MHz) and *majorly* gimped by its 8-bit bus. It was never intended to go in this machine and it shows.
- An unexpanded TI has 256 bytes of general purpose "fast" RAM on that 8-bit bus. It also has 16k of video RAM but you can't use that for storing miscellaneous code or data. The usual add-on floppy controller gives you another 32k of *horrendously slow* RAM, and we ended up having to require that. It's there, it helps, but we still tried to avoid it as much as possible.
- The TI's built-in BASIC is slow and useless, and there's *no* ability to run inline assembly or compiled programs from disk. The assembler is supplied on a cartridge and requires the 32k RAM expansion. You can also get extended BASIC on a cartridge that is much better.
- You can run our demo direct from its own cartridge, or from disk using the "editor/assembler" cart, *or* from disk using an extended BASIC cart. That required three different loaders, but the choice is yours.
- Of the three main emulators that are around for this thing, two of them - Classic99 and JS99er - were made by members of the demo dev team, Tursi and Asmusr respectively. They have both since been updated to run all the scanline effects & general hackery that we needed to make this thing work, so go ahead and emulate. B)
added on the 2017-01-30 06:45:39 by jmph jmph
Nice!
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 07:26:18 by Mystra Mystra
rulez
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 09:02:14 by deetsay deetsay
#kickass

i somewhat regret to not contribute to this
but it seems my help was not needed anyway :D

rulez, motherfucking rulez!
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 09:20:19 by HellMood HellMood
Nize! This rotzoomer section was just BASSig!
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 11:10:27 by TBit TBit
Holy hell it's cool!
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 14:07:14 by trigger trigger
Great !...I have one of those TI's in my attic :-) The CPU looks really interesting to code on...may be the first 16 Bit CPU for the masses at that time !?
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 18:30:31 by Kuemmel Kuemmel
<3 megademo for this platform.
It`s also a good timing to get out a Texas demo, with the actual Cow-boys attitude of the new president of USA (Trump).

My favorite part is the wolfenstein one... as the framerate is high...
I also like the filled 3D with imperfect chars... it give a style, although I understand must be due to some limitation to get that FPS?
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 18:36:35 by F-Cycles F-Cycles
Just to clarify things, we picked the theme *long* before the rise of the current macho political regime, and it has nothing to do with that. This is not a political demo at all. I *hate* having to even write this disclaimer, but what can you do.

("Don't mess with Texas" is a long-running anti-littering campaign that became a catchphrase. :)
added on the 2017-01-30 19:24:00 by jmph jmph
Indeed, the whole Texas relates to Texas Instruments then anything else, no political reference at all.
added on the 2017-01-30 19:35:10 by Ramon B5 Ramon B5
Very nice, good-looking effects and cool music!
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 21:36:53 by puppeh puppeh
The next group is going to have to search hard to find something you didn't include. ;)

I got to see a brief preview, but this is great. :) Well deserved win.
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 21:36:55 by Starchaser Starchaser
TMS9900 thumb.
What a pity I couldn't easily find other TI99 prods here...
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 21:39:25 by lvd lvd
Nice work! Not sure about the specs of the machine either, but judging from its design date they're probably not very great
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 22:27:42 by Tjoppen Tjoppen
Good demo.
rulez added on the 2017-01-30 22:47:28 by hitchhikr hitchhikr
A little info about the hardware specs to those who are wondering: as jmph mentioned, the sound chip and the VDP are the same as those which are present in the MSX. But rather than the 8 bit 3.58 Mhz Z80 we are spoiled with in the MSX, we have a 16 bit 3.0 Mhz TMS9900. 16 bit, that should be great, right?

Wrong. Each instruction on the TMS9900 takes on average around 15 - 30 clock cycles (!!) to execute plus the wait states for memory access and the 8 bit data bus and you have a painfully slow machine.

http://drolez.com/retro/ estimates it at about 0.1 - 0.2 MIPS. Compare that to about 0.43 MIPS for a 6502 running at 1 Mhz and about 0.58 MIPS for a Z80 @ 4 Mhz and you start to get the idea of how seriously under powered this machine really was (if you've ever coded for the MSX and are familiar with overrunning the VDP with the Z80, something to point out here is that the TMS9900 is too slow to overrun VDP!).

So naturally, we decided to write a demo about it :)
added on the 2017-01-31 00:09:47 by orby orby
The only gotcha to the MIPs comparison is that the 9900 can do a lot more in one instruction than the 6502, thanks to a memory-to-memory architecture. You don't have to use registers at all for many instructions, and if you do, you get 16 general purpose registers at a time anywhere in RAM you want. But yeah, the machine isn't quick enough to overrun the VDP except in a couple of very contrived cases - mostly because of the 8-bit to 16-bit multiplexer which eats 4 cycles for every memory access. ;)
rulez added on the 2017-01-31 11:30:23 by tursilion tursilion
A very nice product to a truly strange machine. Hooray!
rulez added on the 2017-01-31 11:33:57 by nollkolltroll nollkolltroll
rulez
rulez added on the 2017-01-31 13:14:53 by Alopex Alopex
Awesome work for such a limited 16 bit platform. There's definitely a design motif around early 80s color computer demonstrations. That zoom rotate was huge! Nice that some devs have their hands in the emulators. A shame the music repeats midway through, but it is a pretty long demo.
rulez added on the 2017-01-31 15:30:58 by phoenix phoenix
Awesome as always :-)
rulez added on the 2017-01-31 15:38:00 by defcon8 defcon8
I like it!!!!!!
rulez added on the 2017-01-31 20:20:05 by YERZMYEY/H-PRG YERZMYEY/H-PRG
Lots of effects for an obscure platform, which is nice! Although I would have preferred slightly fewer effects and some more focus on design instead, it's still great of course. :)
rulez added on the 2017-02-01 11:53:36 by Kylearan Kylearan
Me likey!
rulez added on the 2017-02-01 15:19:15 by McVenco McVenco
The ego shooter part had me. Awesome work and a fuckton of effort really show - even in the small bits, like the shadow at the twister and the lovely 2D art<3
rulez added on the 2017-02-01 19:11:29 by mog mog
awesome stuff!!!!!!!!!!
rulez added on the 2017-02-01 19:39:05 by Premium Premium
Quote:
for a platform first I think we set the bar at a pretty good height

Yep, you said it yourself! The spex of that machine seem to provide power for even more awesomeness! While you had some very nice routines in there already...the wolfenstein f.e. is really wellmade!
Music rocks.
And the sheer amount of content is really awesome!
Now let´s hope you get some contenders! ;)
rulez added on the 2017-02-02 11:49:42 by ɧ4ɾɗվ. ɧ4ɾɗվ.
platform thumb
rulez added on the 2017-02-02 18:38:43 by Iapetus Iapetus
Exciting news! Should you happen to have a dusty TI sitting around and you wanna run this beast on your own hardware, you can conveniently order carts from Arcadeshopper.com! Well, they're backordered now, but you'll be able to soon. ;)

(Greg is a good guy, I've bought from him before. Note that this is being sold ~at cost with our permission.)
added on the 2017-02-02 18:50:50 by jmph jmph
Here's my thumb
rulez added on the 2017-02-02 22:43:45 by BackSpace BackSpace
Sweet work!
rulez added on the 2017-02-02 22:44:51 by CiH CiH
Awesome effort all around!
rulez added on the 2017-02-03 20:38:05 by Nitro/Black Sun Nitro/Black Sun
Good stuff!
rulez added on the 2017-02-03 22:49:43 by Alpha C Alpha C
Hi all - I've uploaded my tune "Diagonals" from this demo to soundcloud. I've also included links to the source file and VGM file. Enjoy!
https://soundcloud.com/diagamblic/dya-diagonals-desire-dont-mess-with-texas-demo-ti99-4a
rulez added on the 2017-02-03 23:39:45 by Dya Dya
Incredible work, guys! As TI-99/4A owner i am really thankful to finally have a real demo available for my system.
added on the 2017-02-03 23:44:06 by autrax autrax
this f*cking rulez!
rulez added on the 2017-02-03 23:49:23 by autrax autrax
fkn super nice for platform firstie, great tunes! =)
rulez added on the 2017-02-04 00:01:55 by gentleman gentleman
Massive work on a funky platform guys.
rulez added on the 2017-02-04 00:05:14 by 4pLaY 4pLaY
m-m-m-multipart!
rulez added on the 2017-02-04 00:41:24 by psenough psenough
Demo for the weirdo :)
rulez added on the 2017-02-04 11:26:23 by slayer slayer
Impressive.
rulez added on the 2017-02-05 00:42:39 by Saga Musix Saga Musix
Thanks for the tips about hardware specs. I am a sucker for those scanline effects - especially the 3D-floor which scrolls à la Trailblazer: I know how hard it is to get this from the VDP (see mine on MSX1). Respect!
added on the 2017-02-05 09:02:05 by Overflow Overflow
This is voodoo magic code for a TI-99!
rulez added on the 2017-02-05 23:47:37 by ramon ramon
nice work guys!
rulez added on the 2017-02-08 16:02:44 by daison daison
Great prod on a very limited and obscure platform!
rulez added on the 2017-02-08 18:32:35 by Scali Scali
Impressive for a TI/99 4A!
added on the 2017-02-11 02:27:19 by AntDude AntDude
Great work! It's fantastic to see a real demo for the 99/4a, we'll definitely be screening this at Demosplash 2017. This is a platform I always wished would get more attention - the TMS9900 is a cool CPU, but I imagine the hacky and cheap hardware design of the rest of the machine makes it not much fun to develop for.
rulez added on the 2017-02-13 00:21:33 by lroop lroop
Cool! Can I run this on my TI 99/4A? I don't have the extra stuff in nfo cos it's rare++, so... can I easily build a cartridge if I have a 512K EPROM? Or I order a cart somewhere? :)
rulez added on the 2017-02-18 00:01:42 by Photon Photon
^^ You need the 32k expansion for the TI or it won't run. If you want to build your own cart you can order either the 512k (red) PCB or UberGROM board (blue) from arcadeshopper.com & use your 512k EPROM - or you can just buy a premade cart from there too. :)
added on the 2017-02-19 07:47:05 by jmph jmph
I don't really know what's possible on Ti99/4a but this one makes me feel good... waaaaoooo!
rulez added on the 2017-02-20 15:56:57 by ast ast
Also, 2 things to correct:

Sound:

MSX: AY-3-8910 - TI: TMS9919

So the sound is not the same at all.

Memory:

128 16-bit words (256 bytes) scratchpad. (8 bits times 16, because of 8 bits databus each of the 2 SRAM chips)

There is an interesting chart on how many cycles each operation takes depending on the type of memory and bit-width, because the CPU-core has also been used as a microcontroller and later generations of the CPU.
rulez added on the 2017-02-23 12:55:40 by Exin Exin
Nice stuff
rulez added on the 2017-02-24 23:14:27 by bitl bitl
I love the colours of TI-99/4A!

Nice, distinct style throughout the demo and some dope effects. Could have been a tad shorter, omitting a few effects that weren't spectacular neither code nor design wise.
rulez added on the 2017-03-29 00:40:34 by raver raver
Great Texas Instrument demo, think i already had thumbed this up as i posted it on http://vintagegames.se and the Swedish Retro community sites when it was released :P
rulez added on the 2017-10-08 23:33:19 by Queen_Luna Queen_Luna
Love this one!
rulez added on the 2018-03-14 13:51:39 by EWN64 EWN64
platform thumb and a special thumb for messing around with hardware that is just pain in the ass !
rulez added on the 2018-03-26 09:44:43 by Asato Asato
wow
rulez added on the 2019-02-19 22:25:48 by Adam Bazaroff Adam Bazaroff
Awesome demo, the music is a bit repetitive, but has a distinct groove that matches the speed of the machine! Impressive coding parts that show off what one can do with the machine. It's a shame the machine is underrepresented in the demo scene. I would like to see more!
rulez added on the 2021-01-08 16:20:37 by spkr spkr
ok
rulez added on the 2021-02-22 18:45:01 by Blast! Blast!
yes
impressive
rulez added on the 2022-10-28 12:01:10 by gorgh gorgh
platform thumb
rulez added on the 2023-12-21 01:58:21 by dankcomputing dankcomputing
Can I buy the speech extension for a real TI-99/4A today?
added on the 2023-12-26 03:10:56 by Photon Photon

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