Retro Robots Beat The Clip Champ

Is that an essay title or a Flaming Lips/Mountain Goats collab?

Since we got back from Alabama, I’ve been armpit-deep in Texas Instruments flotsam and lore, cataloguing my collection, testing cassettes, and writing copy for my upcoming series of review videos.  I’m trying to find a balance between the written word, which is my preferred method of expression, and the video I know I need to put out there if I hope to archive some of this stuff for posterity.

It's always a case of baby steps (and then equal and opposite baby steps backward).  I wanted, for example, to get the games from my recent UK cassette haul from tape onto a Compact Flash card using a device that treats it like a virtual TI disk drive, and can be read by both the 99/4A and the emulator on my desktop PC. It sounds a little cumbersome, but I’ve done it before, as recently as last year, to save old TI games and disseminate them to the larger community.

I fire up my “CF7+” for the first time in ages, and… nothing.  My TI locks up.

I go back upstairs, search my PC for the manual I swear I have a PDF of… no dice.  I go look for online information in the FAQ kept in one of the main TI forums… the site is down.

I give up, go back downstairs, and play Robopods for a while, since I spent all that time loading it in off tape.