While my Frogger v3.0 game for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition has been racking up insane quantities of downloads, and was the first TI-BASIC game for the calculator to utilize homescreen scrolling, I'm not thrilled about it being one of my most-downloaded TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition projects. The slow LCD refresh rate, a result of coupling a processor that can pipe graphics out at a maximum of about 107Kpx/s and an LCD that can handle about 4.6Mpx/s, makes the game less fun than it is on the much more response TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus, so I've been wanting to improve it in some way for quite some time. I've tentatively decided that that will take the form of a quick Hybrid BASIC program for Doors CSE 8. I'll work on it while I take a hiatus from my hybrid Jezzball project (I'm stuck on optimizations) and Doors CSE 8 (I'm waiting for bug reports on Release Candidate 1). Here's an example screenshots with the sprites I whipped up, all of which use the TI-OS palette:

That looks quite cool actually, and I like how great it came out considering the color limitations.

I am curious how this will come out as an hybrid game, since no other hybrid game ever used sprites before.

I've finished it! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, in terms of gameplay and responsiveness. It's slightly over 4KB with all the sprites, but I'd say it's worth it for how it compares to playing the scrolling homescreen version, Frogger v3.0. I'll still include that in the download, for old times' sake, but hopefully this will drive more people to explore what's possible with the xLIBC and Celtic 2 CSE libraries. I'll be testing it more tonight and releasing it in the morning.

Those sides of the roads are not very pleasing to the eye. Is that because of jsTIfied or is that how it works?

That's how it looks on the calculator. TI's palette gives us exactly one shade of green, so I dithered green with a little brown for the grass. Unfortunately, as you point out, it's a suboptimal result.

Wouldn't pure green do the job?

I wanted to differentiate the grass from the frog better, and I didn't think that using pure green for the sides would therefore do the job.

Honestly, I think it looks just fine with the brown mixed in.

I am too lazy to actually make my own post so instead I quote people and then don't say anything new.

Whelp, thanks to that feedback and a dozen games played to look for bugs, the game is complete. Check it out and enjoy:

http://www.cemetech.net/programs/index.php?mode=file&id=854

Just a little correction for the Facebook post: This is actually the 2nd ever hybrid BASIC game for the 84+CSE.



It would be the first one to ever use an ASM lib that doesn't run with the Asm() command, though.

I'll install Frogger on my calc soon .

Oh yeah, I was forgetting to count Asm()-powered hybrid games as Hybrid BASIC games. How could I forget Sord of Atari?

True, it's by far the most popular Zelda game ever released for the color calcs. Oh wait...

On a more serious note, I should try to make a DCS version that uses no external sub-program. I also need to get started on xLIBC games, but it's hard to sync motivation, health and free time together >.<

It looks great

I'm just curious on how you implemented the moving cars bit, and I wonder if there is a way to speed them up any? Otherwise, it looks like it will be pretty easy to get through it.

Will definitely give it a go when I get a chance!

On higher levels, it's challenging to get through. The moving cars are implemented as a quadruplet of lists that store X, Y, direction, and car type for each car. I originally had all of the cars move once for each frog movement step, but that was slow and unresponsive, so now one car moves for each frog movement step as it cycles through all the cars.

Cheers. It's meant more as inspiration for DCSE Hybrid BASIC coders and a reason for users to get Doors CSE than the best game of all time, so I don't mind that the speed is not insanely fast. I'm coming to the conclusion that C2CSE isn't the best solution for real-time arcade-style games anyway, after working on Jezzball.

Jezzball was in hybrid BASIC?

Yeah :< You might need to use xlib for that game, or go full out with asm (which would let you use them fancy asm sprite routines you've been bragging about )

Aye, it's an option I'm considering.

No, I'm working on a new Jezzball game, which is/was in hybrid BASIC.