I’ll go first.
When I was a kid my family had a TI-99/4A. The 99 series was Texas Instruments’ only real foray into the PC and video game market, and it failed to be competitive with Commodore, Atari, and Amiga. Most games were booted from cartridges.
My favorites were Hunt the Wumpus, a sort of early survival-horror with a turn-based grid system, and Alpiner, a mountain-climbing game with various hazards, kind of a reverse SkiFree. It also had the ability to read data from cassette tapes to load text-based games. The one I remember is Hammurabi, a sim/strategy game which I didn’t really get as a kid. Now that I’ve gotten into strategy games like Civilization and Romance of the Three Kingdoms it would be interesting to revisit.
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Does anyone remember the add on voice to speech and advanced sound module that chunked into the right hand side of that machine. It was black magic back then.
My neighbour had Sega Channel when I was a kid. So ahead of its time. I know it’s not a system, but it was certainly obscure. I’ve never talked to anyone who knew what it was.
Sega was just ahead of its time for so long.
I’ve played Colossal Cave Adventure on an ICL 2900-series mainframe from the 1980s at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley.
I had a TI-99/4A! I coded a game for it, you ran around fighting robots and you could find a blaster and a jetpack.
The TI-99/4A had a lot of techical problems which killed its performance. They released a little module that you could insert into the game slot, then you insert the game into the module - this improved the performance drastically. Unfortunately I only heard about it many years later, I didn’t know about it at the time.
Somebody wrote an emulator which lets you run TI-99/4A games under windows or linux and I once tinkered with that and got my own game up and running again.
Those TI joysticks are just the absolute worst. Most underwhelming video game joysticks I’ve ever used, by far.
