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Gaming - Forgotten Consoles - View Post

The Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer. One of the world's first 16-bit machines, released in 1979. Started out with a library of games produced by TI and Milton Bradley, most of which were off-brand versions of popular arcade games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, but it had a few unique games of its own. Later got officially licensed versions of arcade games from Atarisoft. It also had a lot of educational software, and even productivity/home finance software on cartridge. It also supported floppy disk and casette tape media (the tape would make a neat digital noise pattern as it loaded.). It also had a speech synthesizer which could say a number of words from a set vocabulary. Being 16-bit, it had a rather broad color palette for a late 70s/early 80s console/computer. Its downfall came when Commodore initiated a price war which made it impossible for TI to make the computer cheaply enough to compete, despite strong sales in its first year or two.