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John Conway is a British mathematician who invented the simple set of rules for determining patterns on a board that became known as the Game of Life. Despite the name, it is not a game, merely a simulation. In the 'game' one places cells on a grid and, using a very simple set of rules, starting at the top left of the grid and working right and down, determines if the cell in question lives or dies. In the early days, this was done using boards and counters, like draughts (checkers) by hand! Of course, it was a prime candidate for computers and over the years many Life simulations have appeared on many machines, from mainframes to mini's to Vic 20's to Windows Screen Savers! This is my version, written in assembler (TMS9900) for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Home Computer - the machine I grew up with as a child (had one in 1983 at the age of twelve). It process the standard rules of Life (there have been quite a few variations over the years), and features an editor too. Using the editor, you can move the cursor around the 'universe' and drop cells where you like, and then animate them and watch life unfold before your eyes. Some shapes/patterns produce beatiful geometric shapes over the course of the a few 'generations' before stabilising or dying out - some of these can be seen in the demo. The program is about 8K in size, but in truth the editor and engine only take up about 4K, the majority of the footprint is taken up with the long scrolly message! (ahem). The ...

Another speech demo. The speech chip used in the TI-99/4A speech synthesizer was designed around 1976-1977. A trimmed down version was used in TI's famous Speak and Spell toy. Here, I took a section of a pod-cast from www.retrobits.com (great site!) and downsampled to 8khz mono, then processed in QBOX. You can see the assembly source code if you change the view to full screen ;-) The original WAV file was 283KB, the speech data, after processing, was 4.6KB :-) NOTE: What you are hearing here is an EMULATOR, not the real thing. It sounds better on the real thing :-) Also, it's much more readble if you view this video in High Quality. Hope you retro fans like this vid ;-)

The lovely Anggun in session, singing live at West 54th Street, singing David Bowie's 'Life On Mars'.

Demo of the TI-99/4A talking. It's always been difficult to generate speech on the TI using the TI Speech Synth, because the synth chip uses LPC (linear predictive coding) to produce the tones and sounds. This demo was produced QBOX Pro (a very old piece of 16 bit Win 3.0 software). I recorded my voice as a WAV, down sampled, removed breathing noises, corrected BIAS, and processed using QBOX. QBOX gives you the data to fire at the synth chip. I then wrote a simple machine code program to do the talking and update the display. Enjoy. The TI-99/4A emulator you see here is Win994A by Cory Burr. MESS produces (arguably) slightly better speech results. This program DOES work on a real TI too! QBOX is (formerly) commercially available software written by the designers of the TI Synth chip themselves (after they left TI). The software was re-discovered by Ben Yates after his endless search of the internet trying to find suitable software. Without Ben, it would still be impossible to generate ones own speech with the TI speech synth. There are no instructions with QBOX, but Ben kindly supplied copies of his correspondance with the programmers, which contained some rudimentary instructions. Thanks Ben. :-) If anyone is interested in the souce, I have published it (TMS9900 assembler) here: www.planet-99.net

How to reproduce your own speech using the TI-99/4A, (or Win994A Emulator), QBOXPro software and a TI synth! The is a re-upload of the video I recently posted. For some reason, the picture quality of the first video was terrible. This time I converted it to WMV before uploading... Much better (and quicker to upload too...)

Written by Gary Garrett, published in 99er magazine circa 1983. Emulator is Classic99 from www.harmlesslion.com

(C) Sony Music Entertainment Another great pop track from the amazing Indonesian Anggun. Anggun is signed to the Sony/BMG label. Her CD's are available from www.sonybmg.com and www.amazon.com - Please support your favourite artists by buying their music. Peace.

Demonstrating some pretty patterns that have been discovered (by others) using John Conways Life rules.

A sprite designer for the TI-99/4A. Written in C. Runs from the Editor Assembler cartridge. Developed with the Win994a emulator by Cory Burr.

A sprite designer for the TI-99/4A. Written in C. Runs from the Editor Assembler cartridge. Developed with the Win994a emulator by Cory Burr.