We have been exploring the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and its programming capabilities for over two years now, but to date, very few monochrome assembly programs have been ported to the calculator. We have seen a shell, Doors CSE, ported from its monochrome equivalent, and games like Spaze Invaders by JamesV, Puzzle Frenzy by MateoConLechuga, and Jezzball by yours truly. However, there has been no concerted effort to port the vast library of existing monochrome programs and games from the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus calculators to the color TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition (and soon the TI-84 Plus CE). That has recently changed, thanks to the efforts of MateoConLechuga, tr1p1ea, Iambian, JamesV, Hooloovoo, and other Cemetechians.

Two weeks ago, MateoConLechuga posted his first experiments making Sam Heald's famous Mario 1.2 game for the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus run on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. His project, later renamed the Mono2Color project, attempts to re-assemble monochrome programs for the color calculator rather than implement some sort of emulation or translation layer. The biggest necessary changes are in the LCD code; Mateo solves this by re-implementing iFastCopy and text routines to use a temporary graph buffer and half-resolution mode to get a surprisingly high framerate with minimal modifications to how the programs and games function. With feedback and parallel work from JamesV, Iambian, and tr1p1ea, additional programs were tested with this technique, including JamesV's Alien Breed 5, a 3D maze program, a 3D Rubik's Cube program, and a tunnel game. They continue to try to make it even easier to create fast, high-quality ports of monochrome assembly programs, so please stop by the Mono2Color project thread and offer feedback, encouragement, and if you're an assembly programmer, your expertise. In addition, I'm exploring how feasible it is to include helper functions to make Mono2Color projects work with Doors CSE for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and TI-84 Plus CE, and MateoConLechuga (and now me) will be working on a MobileTunes CSE port of the storied 4-channel TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus music player.

Serendipitously, Hooloovoo has also posted a topic showing off his work creating a TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition port of Michael Vincent's emu8x emulator. His work will allow at least the TI-82, TI-83, TI-85, and TI-86 to be emulated on the color calculator(s); his biggest obstacles at this point are also fast, efficient LCD emulation code. We will be following his progress keenly, and hope that this is a project that will find a home on many users' TI-84 Plus C Silver Editions in the months to come.

More Information
Mono2Color project
MobileTunes CSE music player project
emu8x Comes to the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition
[TI-84+CE] Doors CSE (CE?) 9 and xLIBC(E) Brainstorming

From left: MobileTunes CSE, Mono2Color, and emu8x CSE

I can not believe how many projects there are for the CSE currently.
I offer my help to these projects, just not programming actual ASM.

Yeah, it's really exciting! I know that community members like tr1p1ea are worried that the TI-84 Plus CE will kill this momentum, since it seems like the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition will be quietly killed off by Texas Instruments in favor of the new calculator, but I remain optimistic. I think we'll find ways to access the LCD and other peripherals on the new calculator so we can port our exciting projects over to it.

I do hope that porting CE programs to the CSE become realatively easy in the future. It would be nice if my expensive calculator doesn't become outdated withing five months of having it.

I'm not sure how well CE to CSE porting will work, as the main incentive of the CE is that it's should (hopefully) be able to reasonably handle the color screen, and from the short videos we've seen it appears to be significantly faster than the CSE.

However, being able to play (ion) 83+ games on the CSE would give you a huge repertoire of games to pick from.

It's really cool how something that started off as an "I wonder what would happen if..." turns into something so functional! Great work, Mateo!