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Comment by coding123 | Hacker News Reader

Do you all hear that? What is it? It's the fond-memory train coming to this thread.

A friend and I were programming a text-and-map based RPG on the Ti-85. It was really awesome, you could walk around on the map from town to town and enemies would find you kinda like Final Fantasy, then you fight them. Anyway we were pretty far into the game. I started programming a "Quadra Pong" game at the same time. This Quadra Pong was networked with two Ti-85s so each player would be on their own calc, connected using the connection cable (sold separately). Anyway, got pretty far in the game, but had to borrow my friends calc to test it. Something you should know about the connection cable and bugginess, is it sometimes caused both connected calculators to crash and reset. And I mean FULL reset with no memory.

We lost both Quadra Pong and our RPG in one tiny scary second... still crying over that one.

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So many memories of using the AXE parser for the TI. It's a gaming engine that compiles code to assembly, and it's probably at least 10-20 times faster than TI BASIC. Anyway, I've made a two calculator pong using that engine, and the network commands are quite simple with AXE! I managed to combine the server and client into one program that auto configured on startup. Making games with my friend was what really pushed me into computer science. Here's a link for the parser if you're interested.

http://clrhome.org/tutorials/axe/

http://axe.eeems.ca/Commands.html

+/- 10-15 years ago i was also programming games on an Ti-83? There is a cable you can connect the calculator with the usb port of your pc. very usefull to save your games, and get even more games. There was also a program, you can program it on your computer, and than sync it to your calculator.

On the TI-86 you could put machine code into programs (as hex strings). I lacked the cable to connect it to my PC so this was great fun. Simple calculation programs were so much faster. Until I mistyped something and bricked it, had to force a full reset (removed batteries and the watch battery). That's probably where I learned to appreciate what my parents had gone through with punch cards in the 70s, manually translating assembly to machine code.

I had a TI-85, and because it only had 2D plotting while the TI-89 had 3D plotting, I decided to write my own 3D plotting program. I allowed the user to input a 3D equation, and then it would draw a mesh using trig to project it from isometric 3D to 2D and render it on the screen.

It was very slow, but it worked! I even used it for one of my calculus classes. It made very pretty graphics. I later ported the algorithm to Visual Basic just for kicks, and it ran a lot faster on a PC. In the process I learned a ton about programming and trig.

I started programming on a TI-82; I was making programs for basically every formula we had in math. My proudest accomplishment was a program for studying the unit circle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_circle), all in TI-BASIC.

I later got a TI-89, you could program this one in C. I eventually made a darts game on in, complete with a two-player mode, and a single-player mode against an 'AI' with various difficulty levels.

This is basically what made me end up in this career.

Honestly, I love when the fond-memory train comes to any thread.

I once programmed an Army of Darkness / Evil Dead RPG on my TI-85. Animations and everything.

should've used version control \s

(truly sorry for your loss!)

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