Major TI-99/4A fan here too. Parsec was the awesomest shootemup of its time by leaps and bounds. Pixel perfect movement and collision detection. I got good enough to roll over the scoreboard. http://dos486.com/misc/parsec.jpg
The manual claims the sequence of level colors recycles after 16, but that's incorrect. Every level from about 13 to as far as I've reached somewhere beyond 20 is bright yellow. The manual also claims the game keeps getting harder indefinitely, but that's not true either, nothing really changes past level 4. The only difference is that the asteriod belt continues to lengthen each level, but that's generally a good thing as it's worth so many points.
(Yeah, asteriod belt. Parsec misspells it. Blew me away that I played the game for ten-plus years before I ever noticed.)
Awesomely, Texas Instruments released a number of TI-99 cartridge images as freeware. They're included with several emulator distributions. So you can legally and easily play Parsec and TI Invaders and a couple dozen other TI games. http://www.harmlesslion.com/cgi-bin/showprog.cgi?search=Clas...
One day in a distant future, a weakly godlike posthuman entity may want to call a feature of its own stellar system The Asteriod Belt. Other posthuman entities will, immediately recognize a fellow TI-99/4A enthusiast and start to play games together.
I enjoyed the game as well. I remember the thrill of achievement when I figured out it was possible to go backwards through two of the refuelling tunnels.
Also, there's a bug in the bounds checker. When going backwards, hold the joystick up. This lets you go off the left side of the screen and over to the right side, behind the ships attacking you.
The manual claims the sequence of level colors recycles after 16, but that's incorrect. Every level from about 13 to as far as I've reached somewhere beyond 20 is bright yellow. The manual also claims the game keeps getting harder indefinitely, but that's not true either, nothing really changes past level 4. The only difference is that the asteriod belt continues to lengthen each level, but that's generally a good thing as it's worth so many points.
(Yeah, asteriod belt. Parsec misspells it. Blew me away that I played the game for ten-plus years before I ever noticed.)
Awesomely, Texas Instruments released a number of TI-99 cartridge images as freeware. They're included with several emulator distributions. So you can legally and easily play Parsec and TI Invaders and a couple dozen other TI games. http://www.harmlesslion.com/cgi-bin/showprog.cgi?search=Clas...