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'''Game ports:''' two game controller ports, one Atari compatible the other Apple compatible.
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=Foundation's got plans=
New products compatible with the TI99/4A are expected to be forthcoming from Foundation sometime during the first quarter of this year.
Bill Hunter, vice president of operations for the Tiburon, California, company, declined to reveal the nature of the new products, but said that the TI market "looks like a very ripe market" at least for the short term.
"As far as we know, we are the first third-party hardware manufacturer for the TI," Hunter says.
Foundation produces 32K and 128K memory cards for the TI, and Hunter says the company has noticed increased interest in these TI compatible products-particularly the 128K memory card since TI left the market.
The 32K card works in the same way as the Texas Instruments 32K card, allowing the user to access the memory via the Extended BASIC and other applications cartridges. However, since the TI computer can directly address only the first 32K of extra memory larger amounts of memory must be accessed in a different way.
The Foundation 128K card uses a bank switching technique that is controlled by an EPROM (erasable programmable read only memory) chip that Foundation calls "DSR." The memory is included in four banks of 32 kilobytes. The chip, which functions as a disk file emulator, is plugged into the card.
Some early purchasers of the 128K card had found delivery of Foundation's DSR chip to be slow.
However, Hunter characterizes this problem as "very ancient history."
He says the problem resulted because the firm had been shooting for September as the target date for delivery.
All the new 128K cards being shipped, he adds, include the DSR disk file emulator chip and are being shipped from stock. The firm is quoting a two-to-four-week delivery time.
The majority of 128K card purchasers, he says, use a 32K bank for programming and the remaining 96K for file storage.
'''— LB'''
