Adding Emulation to Texas Instruments TI-99 4/a
The TI-99 4/A Computer was released in 1983 by Texas Instruments. As with most vintage computers, it suffers with the inability to print on most modern printers and so would have been an ideal candidate for our Retro-Printer module, had it not been for the need of hard to find expansion cards for the TI-99 4/A which include a serial and parallel ports.
A recent solution for this has been the development of the TI-Raspberry Pi Connection module (TIPI for short) which offers the ability to use a Raspberry Pi for ethernet access and more.
TIPI is a device for the TI-99-4A that allows communication between service scripts on a Raspberry PI and the TI-99/4A with DSR support to act as a filesystem, expose TCP and HTTP access through the Raspberry PI, and enable extensible PI services to the TI such as a mouse, or network gaming protocols.
The TIPI comes in two formats – a Sidecar version and a Peripheral Expansion Box (PEB) format version, giving different ways of connecting it to the TI-99.
As such, the TIPI was already well received by the TI-99 user base, providing limited internet access, plus fast and reliable storage solutions (instead of the original cassette interface); and it was felt that an option for dealing with print output was the natural extension of these functions.
We are pleased that a slightly modified version of our own PrinterToPDF software has been chosen by the TIPI developers to convert print jobs in Epson ESC/P2 format to PDF, thus adding printer support to the TIPI.
The PrinterToPDF software provided the developers with a simple means of converting the captured data, helping them to offer TI-99 users with a wider range of modern options for this classic computer.
