Posted by Stiletto (199.254.212.47) on April 05, 2000 at 14:14:10:
He's got some questions. (snip)
Information wanted
I am always looking for more technical info on the TI-99/4A and its peripherals. If you happen to know something that you
think would fit in these pages, please let me know. In particular, I am looking for:
- Data manual for the TMS9919 sound chip
- Data manual for the Western Digital floppy disk controller FD1771
- Data manual for GROM memory chips
- Schematics and/or programming info for any peripheral card not descibed in these pages (P-code card, P-Gram+, Gram
kracker, etc)
- Info on special hardware (e.g. mouse, MBE voice control system, etc)
Questions for you...
Finally, if you can provide an answer to any of the following question, your contribution would be appreciated:
Hardware
Drive controller:
- Why is there a +12V buffer on the disk controller card, to send the selection signals back to cru bits?
- What's the pinout of the disk drive cable?
Sound & speech
- What's that sound program that by-passes the tone generators and sends sound waves directly ?
- Why is there a WE* (write enable) pin on the sound chip? Does it mean the chip could be read when WE* is high and CS*
low?
- How do you control the volume when sending sound directly to the sound chip?
- What are the possible frame rates for the TMS5520C speech synthesizer?
RS232 card
- Can the TMS9902 handle 9-bit transmission?
Software
- Why does the routines in the disk controller card read/write bytes using two independent MOV operations in a loop that's
performed for half the number of bytes? Why not a single MOV in a loop performed for the right number of bytes?
- Anyone knows a program that scans an assembly source and adds comments indicating how long each instruction is going to
take for execution?
- Does XML >14 place the string length in word >8350-51 for string array elements?
(end snip)
Go here if you have an answer, or email him [email protected]