And with TI-99/4A Extended Basic, you got the ability to define 16x16 pixel sprites (in much the same way, by passing big hex strings to some function) The cool thing about sprites on the 99/4A was (unlike sprites on the Atari 400 and Atari 800, or the Commodore 64, contemporaries of the 99/4A) that once set in motion, the hardware would keep the sprites moving all by themselves, even if your program halted. This was the same graphics hardware as that found in the ColecoVision, and I think also, the Coleco Adam. The bad part about this is that collision detection was, pretty awful in Extended Basic, and if more than 4 sprites lined up on the screen horizontally, you'd get some glitches since the sprite hardware couldn't keep up with the video signal generator. You could also do cool animations by redefining on the fly the graphics characters that defined the sprites, so that, for example, asteroids could rotate (remember Parsec? ) as they moved across the screen. The sound chip was pretty cool for it's time too, as I recall, multiple voices. TI also really locked the hardware away from the user though, giving you a peek() command, but no poke(). What a tease.

Another consequence of this weird character graphics thing...There was no way to address a single pixel on the screen. So for example, the TI Logo language was adversely affected by this character graphics design. Logo is most famous for having turtle graphics in which you direct a "turtle" to move around by various commands telling it 'forward so many steps", "right so many degress", "pen up", "pen down" etc., Well, TI Logo implemented this functionality by redefining the set of 256 8x8 characters as the turtle moved around drawing, so that meant that if your turtle drew something that couldn't be fit somehow within 256 8x8 character cells (which were not arranged in a predetermined configuration, thankfully) you'd get the lame message "out of ink". Getting "out of ink" was really not a very difficult thing to do.

Ahh, the TI99/4A, my first computer. The joys of audio cassette storage and those damned plug in cartridges forever causing random resets. Well, at most you'd lose 16k of data.