[ksarul]

I pretty much do everything on my real TI, not on emulators, so my advice might not be the best. The developers for Classic99 and for WIN994A are both still actively developing their emulators. I can let Tursi know about the issue you experienced with the Text-to-Speech attempts and see whether it is a known issue or something new. He's pretty responsive on fixes. On the look-and-feel side, all of the TI emulators show the display pretty much as it was on the original. There are a couple more you may not have seen yet: Michael Schwartz has recently updated his old V9T9 emulator to run under Java. Michael Zapf has done a huge amount of work on the TI emulation under MESS (it now allows TI-99/4, TI-99/4A, TI-99/4A with v2.2 ROMs, the TI-99/8, and the Myarc Geneve9640). It will also emulate the TI's cousin--the Tomy Tutor (known as the Pyuuta in Japan where it originated). Rasmus Moustgaard has also built an interesting emulator called JS99. It is interesting in that it supports some of the newer hardware (like the F18A video enhancement which allows some really interesting manipulation of sprites) This one is possibly a great draw for the kids, as it also has all of the new games Rasmus has programmed for the TI, some of which also take advantage of those F18A video enhancements.

I still design and build new hardware for the TI too--as do several other folks. If you haven't hit the AtariAge site yet, there is a pretty active TI programming forum there under their Classic Computers section.