Via Make.

Anyone remember the TI-99/4A? We do. Well not anecdotally, but out of our fondness for retro computing.

The TI-99/4A was one of the first home computers (in fact its immediate predecessor, the TI-99/4 was the first 16-bit personal computer), released in 1981. In the style of its later (but more popular) cousin, the Commodore 64, it was self-contained in a single console along with a built-in keyboard. What made the TI-99/4 series extra special was its peripheral expansion system, a collection of different modules that could be stacked to expand the system’s capabilities. As you can see, this could get out of hand pretty quickly…

We decided to resurrect one of these bad boys and make a retro-inspired emulation machine — Raspberry Pi style. To run the system, we used the RetroPie Project. This Raspbian-based distro is a fairly comprehensive emulator environment. It’s relatively easy to setup and quite robust.

One of the main things we wanted to do in this build was to retain the utility of the original built-in keyboard. We used Matthew Epler’s method of doing this. He used a Teensy++ 2.0 microcontroller and wrote some great code for that. We wanted to save a few bucks, so we used the standard Teensy 2.0 and modified his code a little to match the pin outs.

Read more.

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