Published by Tari on August 12, 2019 at 1:43:09 AM CST | Discuss this article

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Careful/longtime observers among readers might recall how sometimes we (the site admins) agree that some behavior of the site is weird but would be difficult to fix. Well, the time for improving that situation is now! partially here, but a long process to come.

What is new, is that today I believe reimplementations of core parts of the site are sufficiently functional and integrated to allow us to being switching parts of the site over to a new backend as they become ready.

What you can do

As of right now, you can opt-in to using the new backend where available by going to cemetech.net/7.

If you opt in, carry on using the site normally and report problems to admins as usual (by posting in the website bug reports subforum). After a time of running opt-in to try to shake out any bugs I've missed, I will flip the switch to make this the default configuration. Then we can do more concerted work to replace other parts.

If things get particularly broken after you do this, try clearing the cookies for Cemetech in your browser which will revert any opt-in.

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Published by Michael2_3B on July 3, 2019 at 5:33:23 PM CST | Discuss this article (1)

As I'm sure you know, 2018 is long over, and so the poll for the Projects of the Year 2018 has also finished! We know it's been a while, but we are finally here to share the results!

5th Place goes to:

• TheLastMillennial, who created Advanced Brightness Utility! This program allows you to darken and brighten your calculator screen beyond what the OS allows you to.
  
• Michael2_3B, who created BasicNote CE! This text-editor, programmed completely in TI-Basic, allows you to write and store notes directly on your calculator and comes with many helpful text-editor features.
  
• Ryadel, who created the Arcade Bartop Machine DIY tutorial using Raspberry Pi! This is a full, professional tutorial on how to make your own arcade machine for all the DIYers and hardware and arcading enthusiasts.
  
• 123outerme, who created Gateway to Legend, which is an incredible open-source puzzle-RPG for the PC.
  

4th Place goes to 3 different authors:

• _iPhoenix_, who created The Button! This is a king-of-the-hill style browser game where you compete for ownership of the button.
  
• Xeda112358, who created Grammer 2! It is a new programming language for the monochrome calculator, which offers you more control over the calculator and has many features.
  
• commandblockguy, who created Mahjong CE! For anyone who played the original computer game, this is a fun recreation of it where you must strategically find and match tiles together on a 3d stack.
  

3rd Place goes to:

• jonbush, who created FlowCE! This is a recreation of the popular mobile puzzle game Flow, where you connect dots together.
  
• BoomBrush, who created the TI-84 turned into 3G mobile phone! This is an incredible accomplishment and we recommend you check it out.
  
• ckosmic, who created Chip-84! This is a Chip-8 interpreter for the TI-84+ CE. It has all the opcodes that chip-8 supports along with a very cool UI.
  
• _iPhoenix_, who created Attack of the Snails! In this game you must run from human-eating snails, but you get more points the closer to danger you are.
  

2nd Place goes to MateoConLechuga, who has tackled the problem of TI84+ CE USB interfacing! This is an incredibly useful library that allows C and Assembly programs to interface with devices and flash drives over USB!


We are proud of all the projects and their authors that competed in the poll, and although they were all quite outstanding, it seems one of the projects blew everything else out of the water. So without further ado,

1st Place, our grand prize winner for the Project of the Year 2018, is TI-Boy CE by calc84maniac! This project garnered an entire 17 votes, making up 54% of the total votes in the poll, while the rest of the votes were pretty spread out. We are super proud of calc84maniac, as he has finished this remarkable Gameboy emulator for the CE. TI-Boy can run many different Gameboy games right on your TI-84+ CE, which is really impressive. Go and take a look, if you haven't already!

Congratulations to everyone who competed this year!



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Published by KermMartian on June 30, 2019 at 1:02:33 PM CST | Discuss this article (15)

Cemetech member mr womp womp reports a few new updates to our venerable TI-84 Plus CE calculators in advance of the 2018 Back-to-School season. We anticipated one of them, while the others are (welcome) surprises. Specifically:

• The TI-84 Plus CE is now available in a new color, Teal, at least in the United States. Mr womp womp notes that the packaging on this new color more closely resembles the packaging on the new TI-83 Premium CE Edition Python (see below). The lede of "Enhanced Graphing" certainly shows where TI's focus lies.
• TI has released OS 5.4 for the TI-84 Plus CE family. At the moment, most of the new features advertised were available in past OS versions, so please report any and all actually new features that you discover.
• Finally, and probably most excitingly, the TI-83 Premium CE Edition Python has been released. Back in March, we first wrote about this new calculator, based on research from around the community, including via TI-Planet. It appeared that TI would be releasing a TI-83 Premium CE (the French TI-84 Plus CE) with Python support built-in, no longer requiring the cuboid Python Module TI used as a stopgap solution to add Python to existing TI-83 Premium CE calculators. They have indeed released such a calculator, which includes an ARM coprocessor and extra-fast Flash alongside the TI-84 Plus CE's existing ez80 processor to run Python directly. If you can muddle through French, you can read (or just look at the pictures from) TI-Planet admin critor's writeup and teardown.

What do you think of these new developments? Are you going to try to get a TI-83 Premium CE Edition Python, even though it's not available in the US (it's only 80 Euros!)? Did you find a new TI-84 Plus CE OS 5.4 feature? Let us know in the attached topic!



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Published by PT_ on May 25, 2019 at 4:47:15 PM CST | Discuss this article (2)

With a new year came many new and updated Cemetech projects! There were quite a few great projects worked on in January, so be sure to give feedback to the authors of these great projects.

• Aether, a "bullet hell" JS shoot-and-run: _iPhoenix_ started working on this new shoot-em-up game, written in JavaScript. This game is optimized very well for speed, and there are even plans to add a custom boss creator, so go check out the demo and the YouTube video linked in the post!
  
• Annoucing zkeme80, a next-gen Forth-based OS for the TI-84+: siraben has started writing a new OS for the TI-84+ series of calculators, based on the programming language Forth. This OS looks very clean, go check out the screenshots and the Github repo linked in the topic!
  
• Boxman TTL: Botboy3000 has continued to work on his hardware based version of Boxman. He's been working on soldering, working on fixing problems, and more! See the thread for a neat video and images of what he is working on.
  
• Candy Crush CE: Our very own admin, PT_, has started a project in C for the CE based on the immensely popular mobile game Candy Crush. It currently supports creating a random board and swapping candies, and the game runs quite quickly. He has said that he promises to finish this project, so go give some support and check out the animated screenshot in the thread!
  
• HD picture viewer [ICE] [TI-84 Plus CE]: TheLastMillennial put some more work into his CE image viewer, which is turning out to look pretty nice! This month he got single images working, and started squashing some bugs. He said that a v1 could be released soon, so head over to the thread and check it out!
  
• Nuclear Reactor Simulator [84+CE BASIC]: SM84CE finished the first version of his nuclear reactor simulator, written in pure TI-Basic! This is a very feature-rich program (check out a list of features in the thread) and you can currently download the latest version in the Cemetech archives. Check out the thread and screenshots for more details.
  
• RPG For the Ti-83+: Sirryan has started working on a large scale RPG for the TI-83+ series of calculators! From the list in the topic it seems like a very ambitious project, so show him some support in this project.
  
• Set CE: This month, BasicTH started and finished a port of the card game Set for the CE. This is a very complete program, including three game modes and excellent graphics, so go and download it from the archives and post about it in the thread!
  
• Skyrim CE Progress Update: kg583 posted this update to his massive project Skyrim CE, written in TI-Basic. The post explains some changes in the game engine and other aspects of the game, go check out the thread and show him some support for this large undertaking!
  
• Teaser!: Botboy3000 posted a mysterious image related to an upcoming project of his. It seems like it could be some sort of Boxman-related puzzle game? Regardless, he has not said much about this project, and it looks like it could be very cool!
  
• TI Number Theory repository: kg583 released this group of TI-Basic programs to assist in number analysis! These programs should work on any 83+/84+ calculator, even older monochromes, and they could be very useful to TI-Basic programmers, so be sure to check out the release on the Github repo.
  
• Warper - Sci-Fi Beat-em-Up: 123outerme continued working on this Sci-Fi platformer, this month adding collision, gravity, and better graphics. Be sure to check out the videos and read more detailed information in the thread!
  
• Z80 Float: Xeda112358 started working on a z80 assembly library for single precision floats. These routines are faster than the TI-OS routines, and there is even a potential for an ez80 version! See the topic for more information and screenshots.

That's it for January 2019, and don't forget to vote for your favorite completed project of this month to compete in the Projects of the Year!

Credits to Jeffitus for writing this post!

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