Since I now have a fairly complete working TI 99/4A, I wanted to play with it.  The strangest thing I found, was I didn’t have any memories of using this machine back in the 80’s.  I have four cartridges for it, which are Home Financial Decisions, Music Maker, Othello and Adventure.

I have no musical ability and Financial Decisions is not a game, which leaves the last two.

I fired up Othello and played that for a couple of hours while watching TV.  Playing on the easiest settings I managed to win both games, but it was no a walk away.  My Othello skills were quite rusty.

I few nights after I got my program recorders worked out, I started up the TI and put in the adventure cartridge.  After choosing 2 for Adventure I get a startup screen of:

Scott Adam’s Adventure Splash Screen

Once that was running, the game wanted me to load the data off the cassette tape, which I set up.  It tells you step by step to rewind the tape, stop and press play.

How did I not remember that when you load the data off the tape it sounds like a dialup connection?  It is also not very fast, taking a little over 2 minutes and 33 seconds.  That doesn’t seem bad until you listen to that noise for over 2 1/2 minutes

The resolution of the text on the TI is not nearly as fine as most modern users are familiar with.  “Forty characters per line using 24 lines” (40 characters in quotes) is not much to work with.  This can make the game a little less descriptive than more modern games of this type.

I made a video of loading this adventure to show what it was like.