Published by _iPhoenix_ on May 9, 2019 at 5:22:49 PM CST | Discuss this article (18)



Now that CC22 is finally over, it is time to vote! To everyone who participated in this contest, thank you. This poll will be open until May 19th. Please do not vote solely based on looks- try the programs before you vote! It is recommended (but not required) that you make a post evaluating the projects and explaining your vote.

Here's the lineup:

Skills Parkour by slimeenergy (thread)

Skills Parkour is a colorful yet simplistic platformer written by slimeenergy. You customize your character's skills, and try to beat the included courses! Be sure to check out the thread for more information.

Space Adventure 85 by RogerWilco (thread)

RogerWilco's text-based RPG for the TI-85 has you customize a character and fight your way through an abandoned space station. Eeriely written, this fully-customizable game comes packed with engaging gameplay and a great story! Check it out!

Rainbow Shooter by TheMustardCat (thread)

Rainbow Shooter is a two-dimensional shooter made by TheMustardCat. It features shooting, random terrain generation, and fully-featured character editor. Customize your character to fit your play style, and kill all the enemies! Take a look at the thread and the readme for more information.

Dungeon by Pieman7373 (thread)

Authored by Pieman7373, Dungeon is a top-down RPG featuring a shop, multiple interchangeable sets of armor, enemies, breakable crates, and more. It is incredibly speedy and has a nice UI. Take a look for yourself!

Splat by LogicalJoe (thread)

Splat, LogicalJoe's entry, is a game that has you move a customizable circle around the screen. You must avoid paintballs of a selectable color while collecting those of another color. It has some sweet animations and a very cool splash screen, check it out!

Arena84 by Jeffitus (thread)

Arena84 is a game for the 84+ and 83+ series of calculators, authored by Jeffitus. In this game, enemies attack you from both sides, and you have to defend yourself using your trusty sword! It lets you buff your own stats, at the cost of improving the stats of enemies. Take a look at the readme and thread for more info.

DR0VE by epsilon5 (thread)

Cemetech newcomer epsilon5's entry DR0VE is a cool car racing game. You can "tune-up" your car to improve your performance in the game after each course. It comes fully packaged with sweet graphics and awesome gameplay- the thread has more information!

Sketch Maze by BasicTH (thread)

BasicTH's complicated but intuitive puzzle game Sketch Maze features clever gameplay and equally clever graphics. It has a very nice help section to explain the game, and even comes with a level editor. It's worth checking out, look at the readme and the thread.

Reverse Tower Defense by commandblockguy (thread)

Reverse Tower Defense is a variant on the classic tower defense game category by commandblockguy! Instead of placing towers around a predefined path, you place the path around predefined towers. It features sweet menus, upgradable towers, technically impressive but engaging gameplay, and some fantastic sprites. Look at the thread for more info!

JPL v1.273 by TheLastMillennial (thread)

TheLastMillenial wrote a improved variant of his CC20 Space entry in ICE! It sports fancy graphics, a cool-looking UI, and some very cool gameplay mechanics. Check out the readme for more information.

That's all folks- I'm happy to see such a large turnout for this contest. Be sure to vote in the poll before May 19th, when the poll will close. Good luck to all contestants!

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Published by _iPhoenix_ on April 27, 2019 at 2:29:49 PM CST | Discuss this article (5)

It has been 4 months since 2018 passed, and it's finally time to vote for the best program of the year. There were many, many incredible projects made during 2018. Over the course of the the last year, Cemetech members voted on their favorite Projects of the Month in twelve polls, sending the best programs of the year to this Projects of the Year poll. Here are the entries:

• Project of the Month, January: FlowCE [C for TI-84+ CE]: jonbush completed his impressive port of the popular mobile game Flow. It is a fully-featured replica, including many levels! The thread is absolutely loaded with screenshots and includes a download, so go check it out.
  
• Project of the Month, February: Turned Ti84 calculator into 3G mobile phone: After being prodded to post by TheLastMillennial, BoomBrush described how he turned a TI-84 into a 3G mobile phone, which is no easy task. It's an impressive read, with a very cool video to boot. Go check it out, and perhaps it might inspire you to some calculator hardware hacking projects of your own!
  
• Project of the Month, March: TheButton: _iPhoenix_'s latest web game, TheButton, was an intriguing social experiment with a button that users had to take control of. It had a cool leaderboard system and was very popular until it was shut down, check out the thread!
  
• Project of the Month, April: Advanced Brightness Utility: TheLastMillennial wrote a simple utility that lets users change their screen brightness beyond what the TI-OS usually allows. A very cool utility, go check it out!
  
• Project of the Month, May: Chip-84: ckosmic wrote a very cool Chip-8 interpreter for the TI-84+ CE. It has all the opcodes that chip-8 supports along with a very cool UI. Check it out!
  
• Project of the Month, June: TI-Boy CE: calc84maniac worked incredibly hard and finished his remarkable Gameboy emulator for the CE. It can run most Gameboy (but not Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advanced, as of yet) games on a CE, which is really impressive. Go and take a look, if you haven't already!
  
• Project of the Month, July: BasicNote CE: BasicNoteCE is a very impressive text editor for the TI-84+CE, written entirely in TI-Basic. It has many cool features, like text selection, word wrapping, and more. Check it out, it is very, very cool, and clearly shows the years that Michael spent creating this project!
  
• Project of the Month, August: Two winners! Attack of the Snails and Arcade Bartop DIY tutorial powered by RetroPie & Rasperr:
  In the former, an assembly game by _iPhoenix_, you are chased by a never-ending onslaught of human-eating snails, but you gain points by having snails near you. The latter is a tutorial on how to make your own bartop arcade machine using a Raspberry Pi, by Cemetech newcomer Ryadel. Both projects are outstanding demonstrations of the authors' technical skills.
  
• Project of the Month, September: Gateway to Legend: 123outerme made a really cool computer RPG! It features special abilities and really cool music. It's been a long time in the making, so go check it out.
  
• Project of the Month, October: TI84+CE USB interfacing: jacobly worked on a very useful library that allows C and Assembly programs to interface with devices and flash drives over USB!
  
• Projects of the Month, November: Grammer 2: Over nearly a decade, Xeda has worked really hard on her programming language for the monochrome calcs, called Grammer. She fixed multiple bugs and implemented a load of new features, so you should check it out (especially since it was recently features on ticalc.org).
  
• Project of the Month, December: Majong CE: commandblockguy wrote a very, very nice Mahjong Solitaire game for the TI-84+ CE! It has some very nice sprites, a timer, sweet user input, and impressive levels to boot. Go check out the gif and download in his thread.

And that's a wrap! What a fantastic lineup of projects for an equally fantastic year. After thoroughly checking out each of the entries, be sure to vote in the poll. The winning project will receive the esteemed designation of 2018 Project of the Year. Good luck to everyone!

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Published by PT_ on April 6, 2019 at 5:25:24 PM CST | Discuss this article (4)

After a few months of absence, we're back again with a shiny new list of projects being worked on, picking up where we left: December 2018. It's quite a nice list, with lots of projects, so be sure to check them out, give feedback to the author (if they're still working on it), or even run the programs and games yourself!

• Announcing Skyrim CE: kg583 continued developing Skyrim CE, a new RPG written entirely in TI-BASIC. He expanded the character set used for displaying levels, such that slopes are possible. Despite the slowness and difficulties attributed with using BASIC, the game looks promising, so go check it out!
  
• BOSshell for the TI-84+CE dev thread: beckadamtheinventor has been working very hard on his own shell, BOSshell, trying to make it able to run BASIC and assembly programs (which is of course the real purpose of any shell). He released a few versions, all with new features implemented and bugs fixed. Take a look at all the possibilities yourself!
  
• BounCE - A relaxing bouncy ball 'simulator': A new game written in ICE made its way to the world: BounCE. This new program, made by Legoman314, is a bouncy ball simulator with features like accelerating balls, change the background colors, and having... square balls! The source is right in the topic, which means you can compile it yourself and play with it.
  
• Boxman TTL: Botboy3000 has made another step with his hardware Boxman. After many other platforms, he decided to make it for real, designed the logic boards and finally ordered them, after which he can start with soldering it and put everything together. Take a look at the topic to see what he's actually working on!
  
• CEmu - A CE Emulator: A new version of CEmu is released! The developers worked hard to fix the remaining bugs, while implementing new requests. This CE-emulator is constantly being updated, fixed and improved, resulting in a very stable program which a lot of features, both for the average user and developers. The new additions are for example importing and exporting RAM, and save screenshots directly to the clipboard. If you haven't updated CEmu yet, do it as soon as possible!
  
• Don't Touch The White Tiles CE: BasicTH has released his newly-written game in ICE, the famous Don't Touch The White Tiles! This is a piano-like game where you have to hit the right key to touch the black tiles, faster and faster until you make a mistake. Can you beat his highscore?
  
• Dr. Josiah Ryan Winslow - the talking psychology bot: JWinslow23 has created an online robot which you can talk to, called "Javascript Operator Specializing In Automatic Handling of Responses You Are Notating and Writing In Neatly Spaced Lower Output Windows". It might remind you of nikkybot, it might give weird and funny answers, worth hours of fun!
  
• Generating electricity from sound.: A necro-update from TheLastMillennial regarding his science project, where he tried to generate electricity from sound. Although this sounds spectacular, there is some skepticism whether this would work. But perhaps it could? TheLastMillennial has done some testings, so check out the topic to see the results yourself!
  
• HD picture viewer [ICE] [TI-84 Plus CE]: TheLastMillennial has highly improved his program to show full quality pictures right on your calculator. Using a custom palette autogenerated from the imput images, it now shows the colors much better! Want to impress your friends with a nice picture of your doggo? Use your calculator with this neat program!
  
• ICEPad: Calcuon has made significant improvements on his new program, called ICEPad. This is an advanced note-editor for your calculator, including colored text and several more features. Take a look at his eye-candy screenshot which he posted in the topic!
  
• Mahjong CE: commandblockguy has been continually improving Mahjong CE, finishing game logic, level generation, tile removing, win condition and several UI updated. The isometric look is simply amazing, so check out the program really quick to discover the possibilities yourself!
  
• Snake - TI-84+CE: Yet another snake game is created and released, this time in C by MateoConLechuga. The game is pretty simple, but the snake itself has fancy colors and can go through walls. The source is on Github, so try it out!
  
• Text Dungeon Progress [Finished]!: [PixelPerfect] has released the first version of Text Dungeon, a maze-like oubliette with roguelike elements full of adventure. Can you survive until the end? Can you beat all the enemies? Go play this game!
  
• Xenon Development thread | ICE Shell: Alvajoy123 keeps working on his newest shell, Xenon. So far, many features have been implemented, like running assembly and BASIC programs, a terminal, a bunch of settings and pinning programs. He still has to fix some bugs, but it's definitely ready for usage!

Welp, that was it again! Be sure to vote in the poll what you think is the best completed program of December 2018, and the winner will participate in the Projects of the Year. Stay tuned!

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Published by Alex on April 1, 2019 at 10:35:26 AM CST | Discuss this article (34)

Happy April Fools! :)

Hey Guys, we want to give you an update on what the future of Cemetech looks like.

You Are All Amazing

First, we want to say thanks for being amazing. Without all the visitors, the members that have joined, and those that have volunteered to run the community and contests over the last 15 years Cemetech wouldn't be where it is today. We've gone from an InvsionFree board to phpBB community on shared hosting, and eventually moving to a dedicated host. Without you, we wouldn't be where we are right now.

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In 2018 we attempted to reach a bigger audience on an established and growing social community by opening up a Discord server. It worked and since July our Discord server has grown to 141 members, quickly out growing IRC. The Discord server has channels for 3d printing, various programming languages, gaming, contest discussion plus idea brainstorming, and more; a single channel of Discord & IRC are linked through a bot so that both communities can collaborate. Everyone is welcome to join in so follow this link for the invite.

Later in 2018, after recognizing the benefits of opening the Discord, the Cemetech Admins started to explore other ways to tap into established communities. We hemmed and we hawed at ideas. It was thrown out there that we could push Reddit a bit harder but it was not very favorable. We continued to deliberate and could never settle on something. Meanwhile, inspired by the Reddit push idea, Alex had started branding the Cemetech Subreddit with colors and style under the (admittedly unpopular) Reddit Redesign. After finishing the other Admins were convinced it was the right thing to pursue.

Now it's 2019 and we're officially announcing that we are going to put the forum in read-only mode on July 1st in favor of our Cemetech Subreddit. It's an extreme move--and not a decision we came to lightly--but with no easy way to bridge the two communities we figured it's best to keep all the discussion on one site. We won't be deleting the forum because we want this wealth of information to be accessible. Even after the forum is put into read-only jsTIfied, SourceCoder, and other Cemetech tools will continue to be available and updated. Your account won't be going anywhere nor will anything else change, you'll still be to create, save, export, and edit projects.

We're going to heavily push reddit threads over the next three months so when the forum is placed into read-only mode, the impact won't be as noticeable. To help make the transition easier Cemetech subreddit topics will be automatically posted into the Discord so IRC and SAX members can see when new topics are posted; we're also including a few other calculator and math related subreddits too but in another Discord channel as to not clog up the main discussion.

How does this help Cemetech grow?

Reddit is home to millions of users and even more visitors. By shifting our community over to Reddit we inherit all those potential members. As mentioned, Discord has been a great inspiration for this. We've had members join the Discord who lurk on the site, but didn't want to create an account. Since they had already signed up for Discord they were able to painlessly join the Cemetech Discord Server and get the help they require by tapping the communities incredible knowledge. Just imagine how many others will join our community now that we have an official presence on one of the largest social forums in the world.

If you guys have any questions about this next big step, please let us know and we'll be happy to answer them.



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