Just curious about what your opinions are, what are annoying features when you try out programs/games for any calculator?

Here are some of mine:

* When you are playing in the dark at night and a game turns up the brightness all the way and burns your eyes (Looking at YOU Fridge Frenzy!)
* Random crashing
* Misleading
* Doesn't clean up after executing
* Long dialogue that progresses automatically, and you can't press any keys to skip

AppVars don't archive

That's a good one

Mostly on calculators with folders like the 68k series and the nspire: every program requiring its own (incompatible) directory structure and messing up all of your organization. On the z80 series this is also a problem with programs that aren't actually programs but contain e.g. level data (why not make them appvars then?) or asmdream requiring every program name to start with θ.

I dislike it when programs automatically archive things. I would prefer to be able to choose whether or not I want to put extra wear on the flash. (Which I suppose is a bit silly due to how long the flash lifetime is, even with TI's incompetent swap sector usage.) I can always manually archive things if I plan to run something that might crash with some non-negligible probability. But I understand the reverse position for people who regularly run things that might crash & do not want to have to manually manage save states, & I get that is the typical case.

But then there are programs that unarchive one or more variables just to read from them & then re-archive them without modification on every invocation, which seems pointless & wasteful when variables are directly readable in the archive.

Zeroko- Do you think that the ideal scenario would be a program that archives programs by default, but that has an option to just leave everything in RAM if the user wants (the question is open to others who want to respond, as well)?

I think GB68K has a good model. It has a setting called "auto archive" which if checked puts stuff in the archive (save states, config files, etc.) It's default state is unchecked.

I would be fine with a setting, preferably with it not archiving anything on the initial run before letting the user change said setting. But it would seem the default should be to archive, because otherwise people who implicitly rely on archiving (including non-technical people who just want their game saves to survive other games crashing (or the same game, but that gets tricky...)) would forget to turn it on & lose data. (Perhaps for some programs this implies archiving before the user first gets to change the setting, in which case...oh, well, you cannot win them all.)

Another thing is that zStart automatically writes back assembly programs even if they're not made for shells that already do writeback. Luckily, it only does so if the actual program changed, minimizing flash wear, but this means that if e.g. the program overwrites initialization code to store variables, or if it stores some static variables at the end of its code that should always be reset on start, it will break eventually. This breaks one version of SNAKE and also PACMAN99 after a few runs. Then again, it also makes sure ZTETRIS actually stores highscores, so that's good. Also, if a program stores static variables at the end of its code, it will trigger a writeback practically every time on exit even if it's not necessary. No programs should just rely on writeback.

It is also annoying that zStart is a problem for corrupting the archive and OS.