Continuing our effort to catch up on our ever-present Projects of the Months poll deficit, we are posting more than one Projects of the Month per month. Today’s post is about February 2023, a particularly active month which saw updates posted to no fewer than fourteen member projects. These posts are written with the intent that you check out projects that you may have missed; we encourage you to take a look at projects you may have overlooked before.
That’s a wrap! Don’t forget to vote in the poll and, as always, check out the threads that piqued your interest.
- Alien Breed 5 Episode III: Impact: We saw some more fantastic work from JamesV this month, who added some very slick enemy animations. He spent some additional effort space-optimizing the rest of the game too– this data-heavy feature only produced a net gain of 2kb! Check out the thread for more details on the history of this large-scale remake for both the TI-83+/84+ and the TI-84+ CE.
- Asteroid (TI84+): Cemetech newcomer mrclipse built a monochrome TI-BASIC imitation of the quintessential science fiction experience of navigating an asteroid field. For a first game, this is rather nice!
- Block Party (0808) CSE: Cemetech regular mr womp womp revisited one of his older projects, a Tetris-like Block Party game for the CSE. While his game is still “slow as molasses” (his words, not mine!) this does not diminish the fact that womp has produced a rather fun game (and it runs pretty acceptably considering the platform it was made for). Take a look at the thread if you’re unfamiliar with Block Party or womp’s skillful optimization work.
- CEaShell: A Shell for the TI-84+ CE: TIny_Hacker and RoccoLox Programs have released a new minor version of their shell CEaShell. This release, the first and only such minor version after the main release to date that was significant enough to warrant a post, fixes several bugs of varying severity and adds support for lowercase letters. As one of the cleanest and consistent-looking shells available today, this project is worth a look.
- Celtic BASIC library for the CE: Roccolox Programs and TIny_Hacker continue their fruitful collaboration with a new update to Celtic CE, a project which follows very closely in the footsteps of older TI-BASIC libraries for the TI-84+ CSE and earlier models. This month, we saw the implementation of eleven new commands which greatly expands the utility of the library.
- Coding "Matrix Rain" on a TI83+/TI84+: z80-focused Youtube channel “Ready? Z80” has put together both a program and a tutorial video covering the basics of starting a new z80 assembly game for the 83+ and 84+ from scratch. It even sports a custom font! The video is both entertaining and informative, and a link can be found in the thread.
- Darkblasters: A graphical TI-84+ BASIC RPG: Longtime RPG guru DJ Omnimaga released an optimized version of their latest RPG Darkblasters. The optimization to the already impressively small game was due to tips from womp, who was clearly out for TI-BASIC blood this month. The graphics speak for themselves; go check out the thread and DJ_Omni’s other work if you have yet to see it!
- Elimination: An RPG inspired by Earthbound / Pokemon: Hot_Dog’s long-term RPG project for both the 83+/84+ and 84+ CE lines of TI graphing calculators received a significant update this month, with a fancy super-secret level, an arena where you can sharpen your characters’ blades (so to speak), and lots of extra polish.
- HD Picture Viewer [C] [TI-84 Plus CE]: TheLastMillennial released a version of his long-running project to view picture files on his TI-84+ CE. This new version supports zx0 compression in addition to the previously existing zx7 compression. If you're unfamiliar, zx0 and zx7 are compression algorithms specifically optimized for use on an 8-bit microprocessor. This month also saw a corresponding update to the desktop picture converter, which was promptly copied over to…
- CE HD Picture converter (for Web, in Rust): …the converter webapp written and maintained by Tari. This month saw three particularly notable changes. The first was the aforementioned zx0 support, but Tari also switched over the code that selects the color palette from neuquant (which uses a self-organizing machine learning algorithm to optimize colors) to the more standard– on calculators, at least– imagequant algorithm. Finally, he updated the UI to reflect the changes. The converter is easy to use, merely requiring a modern browser.
- PRIZM racing: a 3D multiplayer racing game for the fx-CG50: Using the considerable power of the Casio PRIZM, Cemetech user duartec continued their work on their impressive racing game, adding texturing to their renderer. This massively improves the visual quality of their game, at only a slight fps impact. Check out the thread!
- Super Smash Bros. CE: After about six months of development, newcomer theflamingninja21 released the first major version of their TI-84+ CE homage to the many calculator Smash Bros imitations that came before it. This release is particularly promising, but the project seems to have been abandoned. If it seems interesting to you, consider leaving some words of encouragement in the thread.
- The Backrooms 1992: Using the “raylib” engine, which supports both Windows and Linux, beckadamtheinventor has created a game with the classic liminal space aesthetic known as the “Backrooms”. While the full game costs $5 on Itch, a free demo is also available in the thread. Because this is a paid software product, we ask that you only consider the free demo when evaluating this project in the poll.
- TInyAuth - An OAuth-based service for the TI-84+ CE: ACagliano continues his epic saga of cryptology libraries for the TI-84+ CE with an OAuth-inspired web authentication system for programs on the TI-84+ CE to integrate with. While he emphasizes that his system is not true OAuth, it is surely good enough for most purposes calculator-based. Take a look at his website, linked in the thread, for more information.
That’s a wrap! Don’t forget to vote in the poll and, as always, check out the threads that piqued your interest.
