![]() The 99/4 retailed for $1,150 (about $4,083 today), and due to strict FCC emissions regulations, shipped with its own 13″ custom color TV set as a monitor. What Came Before: 1979’s TI-99/4Īfter dazzling the world with pocket calculators and digital watches in the early-mid 1970s, Dallas-based electronics powerhouse Texas Instruments set its sights on the emerging video game and personal computer markets in the late 1970s.Īt first, the firm intended to create both a video game console and a low-cost personal computer, but while in development, those products merged together into the TI-99/4 (no “A” yet), which was released in late 1979. Forty years later, here’s what made it special. The Old School Emulation Center (TOSEC) is a retrocomputing initiative dedicated to the cataloging and preservation of software, firmware and resources for microcomputers, minicomputers and video game consoles.In June 1981, Texas Instruments released the TI-99/4A, a 16-bit home computer and gaming platform that became a huge cultural success in America after selling 2.8 million units, although it resulted in a business loss for TI. The main goal of the project is to catalog and audit various kinds of software and firmware images for these systems.Īs of release, TOSEC catalogs over 200 unique computing platforms and continues to grow. As of this time the project had identified and cataloged 466,396 different software images/sets, consisting of over 3.60TB of software, firmware and resources. The initiative was founded on 18 January 2000, with the first official TOSEC website going live 18 August 2000, by a Dutch retrocomputing enthusiast using the pseudonym "Grendel". While the original founder of TOSEC has since ceased to have an involvement in the initiative, a dedicated team of volunteers continue to expand and contribute to the project. ![]() The goal of the TOSEC project is to maintain a database of all software and firmware images for all microcomputers, minicomputers and video game consoles. In addition to this, the project also catalogs other computing and gaming resources such as software and hardware manuals, magazine scans and computing catalogs. Using this data, TOSEC can provide quality assurance and auditing tools for cataloging and validating software images (such as ROM chip images, CD images and floppy disk images etc.) and computing resources (such as manuals and magazines). ![]()
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