The boucing ball, and Wolf3D/Doom wasn't yet a big thing in the 1981-1984 years... And the quality of graphics and sounds, the number of colors, the speech synthesis: the TI99 was more shhhh shhhh...
The real 99/4A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UxJM7AhZvw
Not the same world!
The demo was credited as 2017, so I don't think you can really use the bouncing ball or Wolf3D as reasons.
You could actually buy a speech synthesizer for the TI.
Yes, the demo is impressive compared to what else was available on the machine, but it actually had a (underutilized) 3 Mhz CPU and pretty advanced graphics system.
The TIs biggest problem was that it came with very little RAM, so you generally had to store application data in video memory or expansion cards, which made the machine incredibly slow.
OK for the 2017 demo, but the TMS9900 was slower than the Z80/6502 of the same time, because it was a 16-bit microprocessor with a 8-bit bus, and registers were mapped to the RAM. This demo required power, and is very far from all other TI99/4A games, and most of them were written in assembly (the basic was too slow).
So I still think it's a fake, or it is running on a deeply modified emulator, or with hardware extensions listed in the wikipedia page * ) but it's not a "vanilla" TI/994A.
I don't have any problem believing this can run on real hardware. One of the programmers, Tursi, has done some amazing things that do indeed run on the real thing.
I'm not sure what you're counting as "vanilla", but a TI with the Speech Synthesizer and the 32K RAM expansion is vanilla to me. Those are utterly ubiquitous and period-correct OEM upgrades.
If it required the F18A, which is an FPGA implementation of the TMS9918 graphics chip with some significant new features on it, I'd agree that wouldn't count. That chip makes it a totally different graphics machine.
> TI with the Speech Synthesizer and the 32K RAM expansion is vanilla to me
Agree
> graphics chip with some significant new features on it, I'd agree that wouldn't count.
Agree too. If the graphics chip was so powerful, it's hard to understand why it was so underused, and not integrated in other microcomputers of this time.
The video memory of the TI was 16KB, I had several computers with this size, and you couldn't render with this quality, even statically because at 256*192 it's less than 2,6 bits per pixel. And the number of sprites is more than impressive.
I hear you regarding the speed... I had a TI and I learned to program on it, so I know how amazingly slow it was!
They do mention that they used extra RAM from the floppy drive controller which would help!
I don't see anything that makes me think it is completely impossible. Lots of the more complicated full screen effects could probably be made by altering character bitmaps (which was pretty fast). Parsec managed smooth horizontal scrolling back in the day, but I must admit some of the scrolling stuff definitely looked challenging to do on that machine. I still think, you can get far by manipulating character bitmaps, and clever use of sprites.
I still think calling it "fake" may be a bit harsh on the coders if it isn't.
A mistake on that article... the 32K RAM expansion is a separate card, not part of the floppy controller. They were almost always sold together, however.
Well, Parsec is very far from this demo, if the window is small it's for speed. The demo is full screen, which is impressive.
And Parsec is coherent with what the hardware had to offer for the 3D those years, like Elite.
8088 MPH demoed 1,000 colors on CGA a couple of years ago:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y