I thought the story was was that in order to get around the RF issues with the original TI-99/4, it was only solid with the matching monitor. The TI-99/4a was the one that was sold with a standard RF switch.
Quite right, that was the reason. The TI Color Monitor was actually not too shabby, but not worth the $400 they wanted for it at the time. ($600 for the console, $400 for the monitor. Blech.) Plus the TI-99/4 didn't have the more advanced graphics chip in it. My current CRPG project can't run on one.
To bring the discussion back to Dungeons of Daggorath, another thing that made the game seriously hardcore was the "save game" feature only worked to cassette, and was considered unreliable. Most players would just win it by playing straight through from beginning to end. It can take several hours to play as well.
When you think about it, assuming you played it around 20 times before winning, that means you're getting 30-50 hours of play out of the game. That's actually pretty comparable to modern games in value of time.
I thought the story was was that in order to get around the RF issues with the original TI-99/4, it was only solid with the matching monitor. The TI-99/4a was the one that was sold with a standard RF switch.
Quite right, that was the reason. The TI Color Monitor was actually not too shabby, but not worth the $400 they wanted for it at the time. ($600 for the console, $400 for the monitor. Blech.) Plus the TI-99/4 didn't have the more advanced graphics chip in it. My current CRPG project can't run on one.
To bring the discussion back to Dungeons of Daggorath, another thing that made the game seriously hardcore was the "save game" feature only worked to cassette, and was considered unreliable. Most players would just win it by playing straight through from beginning to end. It can take several hours to play as well.
When you think about it, assuming you played it around 20 times before winning, that means you're getting 30-50 hours of play out of the game. That's actually pretty comparable to modern games in value of time.
Adamantyr