Published by KermMartian on November 21, 2011 at 11:22:09 PM CST | Discuss this article (64)

On a recent ticalc.org news article about Tetris for the TI-Nspire graphing calculator, the top commenter lamented, "Tetris, in COLOR! Woot! I love all of these color games coming out - I just wish that Lua wasn't so slow." As Cemetech has repeatedly and vociferously expressed its support for the Casio Prizm over the TI-Nspire for powerful color-screen graphing calculators, in no small part for its completely open development environment compared to the TI-Nspire's locked-down capabilities, I was immediately inspired (heh) to attempt a Tetris clone for the Nspire. Since my current schoolwork and other endeavors are using the vast majority of my waking hours, I contacted my fellow Cemetech administrator and good friend tifreak8x, since he's currently learning C, to ask if he'd like to join me. Roughly four hours of coding and a bit of spriting later, I have the following to show for my efforts; I'm afraid I got a little carried away, as I'm wont to do. The background is carefully constructed to take much less memory than a full-screen image, pieces can be moved and placed and rotated, pieces can be dropped, and lines can be cleared. More features are missing than present thus far, such as sideways movement collisions, rotation into place, scoring, level/score display, and modes.

Work on this shall continue only as tifreak8x's schedule and my own time commitments permit, but with the speed and power of C development, I don't anticipate it taking that long. Please let us know in particular what sort of modes you'd like the game to have, any criticisms or feedback about the current game, from what you can see in the screenshots, and of course feel free to continue the C vs. Lua debate.



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