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MANUFACTURER:
TIGERVISION
PRODUCT
NUMBER: 7-012-99
RELEASED:
1Q/1984
PROGRAMMER:
ORIGINAL
RETAIL PRICE: $34.95
TOUCAN'S TRIVIA: This game is a port of
the 1983 Orca arcade game Espial. |
TOUCAN'S TRIVIA: The first thing you might
notice about the TI-99/4A version of Espial
is its weird cartridge shape. This is due to the
fact that it plugs into the system's expansion port (where the Speech
Synthesizer plugs into) instead of the normal cartridge port. Most
likely Tigervision did this because TI would not license out
its GROM chips to many 3rd party developers. The GROM chip allowed for
greater amounts of memory to be put onto a single cartridge, and
without
the chip you were limited to 8K of ROM. Therefore, in order to fit Espial onto a cartridge
Tigervision had it plug into the expansion port, which allowed for
more memory than standard cartridges. |
TOUCAN'S TRIVIA: There is a small red
start button on the side of the cartridge casing, which can be used to
start or restart the game. Interestingly, the Espial manual tells the player to
push the red button on the
cartridge in order to start the game instead of going through the
cartridge selection screen. This leads one to believe that the start
button was a way around TI's Version 2.2 consoles which blocked 3rd
party cartridges from appearing on the selection screen. By using a
button to start (and also reset) the game it completely bypassed any
GROM check that the system might have had. Pretty ingenious idea! |
| 1984 Tigervision
Catalog |