8,732
edits
Changes
→Foundation's got plans
The majority of 128K card purchasers, he says, use a 32K bank for programming and the remaining 96K for file storage.
'''— LB'''
=Pole Position, Jungle Hunt coming=
If your Atarisoft Pac Man is lonesome on the shelf next to your TI computer, take heart.
Ms. Pac Man will soon be available to cozy up next to him, according to a spokesperson for Atari.
Currently, Atarisoft titles for the Tl99/4A are Pac Man, Dig Dug, Centipede, Defender, Donkey Kong, Robotron: 2084, Stargate, Shamus, Picnic Paranoia, Protector and SuperStorm.
Scheduled for release at various times throughout the spring are Joust, Pole Position, Ms. Pac Man, Moon Patrol and Jungle Hunt.
Atari will release educational and home applications titles for the TI99/4A later in the spring, but the spokeswoman declined to give specific titles. At this point, Star Raiders does not seem to be among the games to be translated for the TI.
She said she is unaware of any plans for development of hardware or disk or cassette-based software for the TI.
The list price for the Atarisoft cartridge games for the TI is $44.95.
Bruce Entin, Atari's vice president for corporate communications, says the company has met with "very good response'' to Atarisoft, from both consumers and dealers.
Now that Texas Instruments is out of the market, Entin says, "consumers who own those machines are asking, 'What are we doing for software?'"
"Dealers recognize that there's something like two million TI machines out there," he adds.
Despite Atari's plans to add nongame software later this year, Entin feels that games are always going to be an important part of the home computer software market.
He says that about 60 percent of the time people use a home computer is spent on entertainment. The challenge, he says, is to develop software that provides an "entertainment crescendo."
Now that the novelty of home computers is wearing off, marketers are becoming more aware of the need to compete with the hundreds of other leisure-time activities available to consumers.
To be competitive among all these choices, he says, software needs to be "especially compelling."
Entin feels that there will be no more computer price wars such as those of the recent past.
"The home computer market went through a phase of a downward spiral of prices. We think that's over," he says.
"Manufacturers and consumers alike are looking at computers for what they can do rather than how cheap they are," he says.
'''— LB'''
