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They sold 2.8 million of them. More than the total sales for the VIC-20. For comparison, the C64 was ~15M, original Apple II ~6M, Atari 400/800 ~4M.


> They sold 2.8 million of them

Internationally? I don't recall having seen any of them in Germany in the 1980s. Plenty of Sinclairs and Commodores, even an Armstrad, but nothing from TI.


I got one in Australia with Extended Basic, speech synthesiser, joysticks and cassette. The sprites were next-level cool compared to my friends Apple II, Vic-20 and Trash-80

I wrote a pretty good frogger clone (with only the road part to cross) that worked so well because the event loop was just joystick input and call coinc(all) for sprite collision with the Y axis value of your frog indicating you were in a home base position.

I also wrote a kind of 3 part game where each stage used the full resources of the machine, and each stage of the game required another load from cassette, which normally wipes all your memory and therfore variables so in order to pass variables between the stages of the game I wrote hex values into the extended font/character set memory, because the last few were user editable and retained in memory even after fresh program load (which would decode the hex from the font character to keep your score and number of lives consistent with the prior program/stage of the game).

I had Parsec too of course, but way more fun creating your own games from scratch, or porting a printout of a game from TRS-80 basic and then converting it to use sprites.

Aged 11 to 13 I spent my school holidays mostly indoors learning to code, fond memories of the magic of discovery and creation :)


I can't find any solid stats, but it does seem like most of the sales were US and Canada. And probably a fair amount of those sales after they priced it below cost during their death throes. I believe it was under $50 at the end, which was crazy cheap at the time.


It was our family's first computer in the UK -- pretty sure my Dad picked it up very cheap when the local department store were getting rid of the last of their stock after TI killed the machine. The lack of commercial games for it compared to the Spectrum etc meant I spent more time typing in BASIC listings, which was my first introduction to computer programming...


They were sold in Sweden, my uncle had one.




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