Published by KermMartian on December 31, 2006 at 8:37:05 AM CST | Discuss this article (26)

After a hiatus of several months, I have released two BASIC projects I have been working on for two weeks and about three months, respectively. The first is a Real-Time Interpreter (RTI) for the BF language, so named because of the difficulty of both reading and writing in the 8-command, Turing-complete language. Clocking in at just over 1KB, the RTI fully supports all BF commands, and displays output in a console with debug information updated every time an instruction is executed. Input is properly converted from your TI's keyboard into the ASCII character set. The RTI supports the BF-standard $0A as the newline character. The second program is Dark Shadow 2, the descendant of a project I wrote two and a half years ago during the summer, entirely in VTI. The original Dark Shadow had three enemies that cycled down the screen, three possible powerups, and a lives and power meter at the bottom. It used pixel-drawn sprites, and was relatively slow, even with VTI executing at unlimited speed. Nevertheless, it has managed to garner a combined 3,576 downloads, a good forecast for Dark Shadow 2. This new version is rewritten completely from scratch, and is my first project to use StatsSprites, a concept introduced to me by my co-admin Elfprince13, which greatly speeds up the graphics rendering while maintaining the visual appeal and complexity. The game is now set in a series of levels or "stages," with each additional stage requiring more hits upon the enemy to advance to the next stage.

I have a new project coming up soon in the spirit of the contest that is ending this evening, a 3D particle simulator that may prove to be interesting. In addition, there's a possibility that the 1337 Guide to TI-BASIC, written and maintained by the advisory board of the BASIC Elite, may soon be updated with all kinds of new tips and tricks. Last but never least, Doors CS 6 is right on track, although not on schedule for the projected January 1st release.

Download
Dark Shadow 2
BF RTI


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