The included manual for programming BASIC was extremely well written, and it's sprites made it very easy to write your own games. I remember starting with a multi-player 'snakes' variant, a 'defender' clone, an unfinished chess game (ran out of memory), and top down microcar racing game.

I also remember longing for the UCSD/Pascal cartridge as all (library) books I read used Pascal in their coding examples, but it was too expensive.

I later switched to the ZX Spectrum for which I had HiSoft Pascal, and a burnt in bare black&white monitor sold for scrap from an old arcade game.

I'm guessing it was because of the "home computer price wars" where TI-99/4A was aggressively priced much cheaper than Commodore, Atari, Coleco Adam, etc. In addition to the lowest in-store price, TI-99/4A also had rebates.

Texas Instruments was losing money on the TI-99 and they wanted to exit the home computer business. Retail stores were blowing them out at the lowest prices.

It had a smidge more than 4 games. I broke several joysticks playing TI Invaders, and my favorite was Parsec, which was also one of the games which supported the optional speech synthesizer. I also had Tunnels of Doom, Car Wars, and Tombstone City, and remember playing Alpiner.

That's 6 games right there, ... or in other words, a drop in the bucket compared to my friend's Apple ][. Alas. And he could use a floppy disk, while I only had cassette tape or cartridges.

One of my game cartridges was Extended Basic. That probably got the most use.

Older LCDs will probably have RCA inputs though they might not work with all retro computing stuff as the signals are sometimes rather “non standard” (not sure about this particular case).

CRT TV should be fine, as they’re from the right era and a bit less fussy about signals.

Unfortunately, the 99/4a was brutally hobbled by some bizarre design choices that nerfed its performance including forcing the 16-bit CPU onto an 8-bit system bus which halted the CPU to spread each 16-bit read/write into two sequential operations. This was made worse by the fact the CPU used a memory-to-memory architecture (even for most of its own registers) and all the memory was behind that '8-bit wall' - except for 256 bytes of 'fast scratchpad' (aka just 'normal memory' on other 8-bits). Plus the GROM was on PROM chips that were even slower than RAM, introducing more latency.

The whole GROM thing could have been a nice idea if it weren't for the 8-bit bus and slow PROM chip speed. Unfortunately, TI execs were more interested in finding a home for excess PROM chip inventory than making their home computer the best it could be. So, it was hard to extract high-performance game graphics from the system, requiring significant ingenuity from developers.

turning it on and getting a BASIC prompt was real cool. never could save anything, though. I traded it in 1999 or so for an Apple IIc with monitor, with which i could save data.

coincidentally, i just mentioned owning a ti-99/4a to a friend yesterday, we were comparing notes about the first computers we actually owned, and that was it, for me. We had an atari (the wood paneled console one, carts, with keyboard built in, BASIC interpreter on ROM) in '87ish i guess, but i only had it for a couple of weeks before i accidentally blew it up with a cable trying to save something to a tape recorder. the tape recorder had a cable in the back that had a 1/8" TS plug, which apparently was a radio shack "universal power supply" and i guess i put 9VDC into the speaker port.