_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Porting 8-bit Sonic 2 to the TI-84 CE
Willish42 wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
oh man, TI-BASIC was awesome!! My first programming language, and funny
enough due to how the programs worked, a relatively useful trove of
"open-source" code to learn from.
I remember essentially cramming several different modified games
together to make a game centered around the plot for Star Wars: The
Phantom Menace with literally not an ounce of awareness at the irony of
doing so or the vitriol for that movie at the time. Fun times...
edit: This seems like a more robust setup than I assumed, a color
screen and C libraries to write assembly (!!) Good for the author, an
impressive project
pbj1968 wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
Nobody walked out of Phantom Menace hating it. We have the second
movie and then a snarky YouTube video where a man talks funny to
blame for that. And people younger than us think theyâre all
great.
yr1337 wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
Where were you in 1999 when all I had was a crap snake on my TI-89?
Larrikin wrote 18 hours 2 min ago:
I feel bad that you didn't know about [1] . Kids in my class would
have loved to have a TI-89 instead of a TI-83, since there were so
many better games for it.
URI [1]: https://www.ticalc.org/
aidenn0 wrote 19 hours 0 min ago:
There were some great games for the TI-85 (and later the TI-83)
written in Z80 assembly. Certainly things much better than snake.
Someone needed a PC link cable to get it on, but then you could send
from one calculator to another with just the link cable included in
the box. None would have worked on the 92 or 89 which used a
different CPU.
[edit]
For TI-89 games see e.g.
URI [1]: https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/261/26100.htm...
codetrotter wrote 19 hours 37 min ago:
Heck, even in 2005 Snake was all I had on my TI-84 Plus. (Not the CE,
just the plain old 1-bit display version.)
And it was a version of Snake that Iâd written myself, in TI-BASIC
and I used some kind of matrix to store the segments of the snake and
when the snake grew in length the operations to move the snake around
took more and more time. Until eventually it crashed.
It was, admittedly not the greatest Snake game ever. It may even have
been one of the worst ever. But it my Snake and that made it okay
Kerbonut wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
There were a ton of games already available on TI-84 Plus because
the ones from TI-83 ran on it. ticalc.org had a ton of them.
ranger_danger wrote 1 day ago:
What is "8-bit Sonic 2" ?
foobarbaz321 wrote 1 day ago:
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the Sega Master System or Game Gear.
The SMS had an extended life in places like Brazil which led to
certain Genesis titles, like Sonic, receiving ports to the SMS.
Dwedit wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
The 8-bit sonic games were originally made with the Game Gear in
mind. Because the Game Gear and Master System have nearly
identical hardware (except for a different screen size and
palette), Master System ports were made as well.
Aissen wrote 21 hours 41 min ago:
It is true for Sonic 1, but Sonic 2 is infamously difficult on
Game Gear, because the levels where designed with the Master
System in mind, and it didn't port well to the smaller Game Gear
resolution (160x144 vs 256x192): the assets are the same size, so
the effect is almost like a truncated viewport.
aidenn0 wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
There was even the "Master Gear" which let you play master-system
games on the game gear. I played the first Phantasy Star game
that way.
aidenn0 wrote 1 day ago:
URI [1]: https://xkcd.com/768/
Dwedit wrote 1 day ago:
The TI83+ CE (color edition) was made because they couldn't get the
crappy LCD screens anymore, so they were forced to upgrade the
screen, and also upgrade the CPU a bit (now it's an EZ80) because of
the higher-resolution frame buffer.
boricj wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
Technically there's the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition before that
one, where TI put a color LCD screen on a calculator powered by a
Z80, the same one as the TI-84 Plus.
It is reportedly slow as molasses.
boricj wrote 1 day ago:
That XKCD comic is more than a decade old at this point. Nowadays,
graphic calculators for the most part have 32-bit MCUs (or even SoCs
for the high-end), color IPS displays with backlights, USB
connectors... On the software side, the NumWorks firmware is
programmed in modern bare-metal C++.
Even Casio scientific calculators have an on-calc programming
language and a spreadsheet nowadays.
easton wrote 1 day ago:
At least in the US, most schools are still on the TI train. People
have others, but most of the the time they suggest you get a TI-84,
which is still super expensive and still a Z80
pbj1968 wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
At least back in the Stone Age, the TI-84 is for engineering.
They made another one that did matrices for business students.
The teacher didnât care that the TI-84 had software that could
simulate the matrix functions. By god, TI mailed her a free
TIâ86 and thatâs what we were using. Google says now
theyâve all got a matrix button, so thatâs nice.
Casios were leagues ahead, tho.
epcoa wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
The TI-84 came out in 2004 which I have a hard time calling
Stone Age for anything calculator related, graphing or
otherwise. But if you were born in 2000 or so perhaps it feels
that way. This is also getting well past the time calculators
were marketed heavily outside the education market anyway. Also
the 84 really is an enhanced 83 which is solidly targeted as a
secondary education machine. TI would even sell them etched
with âSchool Propertyâ [1] In the Stone Age of graphing
calculators (80s-90s), HP was dominant in engineering
disciplines (and France).
Now I think maybe youâre confusing with the TI-85 (but the
TI-86 was a TI-85 replacement and handles matrices just fine
and superior to the 84) - so then perhaps your teacher had a
TI-83. That would be more plausible and sensible.
URI [1]: https://brownmath.com/ti83/diff8384.htm#Catalog
pjmlp wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
Which is ultimately a US school problem, as most countries don't
have exclusivity deals with calculator companies, TI, Casio and
HP all get in, plus whatever fits the requirements.
It not being changed in decades appears to imply there isn't
really something families see as a problem, versus others.
buescher wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe I will check this Sonic port out.
I had to get a TI-84 Plus CE for a college course I took a few
years back. I'm an RPN guy so it pained me, but it's a nice step
up from the 1990s style TI calculators. It has a fast Z80 family
processor, plenty of RAM, a decent 320x240 color display, and a
built-in battery that's rechargeable by USB. Usability for
everything I used it for is quite good (matrix functions and some
root-finding) and almost self-explanatory.
I take it out of the drawer it's in about once a year or so and
standby battery life is extremely good. It must cut off power
completely in standby.
jamesgeck0 wrote 21 hours 3 min ago:
The TI-84+ battery life was bananas. I used it constantly
during university and almost never had to change them.
Dwedit wrote 1 day ago:
8-bit CPUs like the 6502 and Z80 are much better for teaching
assembly language than something monstrous like the x86. ARM and
MIPS are probably okay too.
nuc1e0n wrote 20 hours 15 min ago:
Tools exist that can reassemble 8080 assembly language code to
run on the 8086 or later x86 CPUs. The opcodes aren't quite the
same, but they're close enough feature wise. Indeed it was one
of the original design criteria for the 8086 to be source
compatible with 8080 code.
toast0 wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
TI made assembly officially available for a while (starting on
the ti-86, I think), but they've walked it back and current
calculators need help to get to it.
Dwedit wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
TI83 had a hidden "asm(" command, it was
"Send(9prgmXXXXXXXX", which takes in a hex file then packs it
to address 9327. But because it kept two copies of the
program in memory (one double size, one half size), people
went on to make assembly shells to relocate the program to
9327 without the need for a double-size program. The final
assembly shell Venus manged to be absolutely tiny, and did
not need to "install" itself (by intentionally creating a
memory leak).
DIR <- back to front page