Projects of the Month: September 2021
Published by KermMartian 1 year, 3 months ago (2022-11-21T21:35:38+00:00) | Discuss this article

Despite the beginning of the last school year, September of 2021 continued unabated Cemetechians’ impressive dedication to their projects. As we continue to try to catch up to the present on our Projects of the Month posts, here are the project updates that our members posted:
  • (Axe) Generic Fighting game (Not Super Smash Bros at all): Wavejumper3 brainstormed a Super Smash Bros-like arcade-style fighting game to be written in the Axe programming language. After posting the design for a sprite, he pivoted to planning to make the game in PyGame; at press time, the game remains paused.
  • Calculator Street Racing: A drag racing game for 84+/CE: In September, Oxiti8 added many more cars (the full list reached at least 30 cars by the end of September), graphical improvements, a Doors CS icon, and other features to this TI-BASIC game for monochrome z80 calculators. Through this year, a color version for the TI-84 Plus CE has progressed, so check out the topic for details.
  • CE C Toolchain and Libraries for the TI84+CE/TI83PCE: In September 2021, MateoConLechuga released v9.2.1 of this vital CE C development component, primarily encompassing bugfixes.
  • Darkblasters: A graphical TI-84+ BASIC RPG: Returning to his roots, DJ Omnimaga released an impressive, pure-TI-BASIC, text sprite-harnessing RPG. Check it out, and relive the glory days of monochrome TI-BASIC RPGs!
  • First Fantasy: Mana Force (xLIB CSE & CE Textlib RPG): It was a busy month for DJ Omnimaga: he also updated and re-released a color-screen calculator RPG called First Fantasy: Mana Force for both the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and TI-84 Plus CE. The re-release adds new dungeons, difficulty balancing by way of more treasure chests, great-looking sprites, and assorted QoL fixes.
  • HexaEdit CE: On-calc hex editor: This month, Captain Calc announced that an in-progress third version of the tool, a complete rewrite with focus areas like speed and performance, incomplete test coverage, adding a Ports editor, and more security features. At press time, Captain Calc has not announced any further progress, so we hope it will eventually be forthcoming!
  • ICE raycast (paused): Paradoxically, the start of the school year gave Therad2 more time to work on this game. It resembles a Doom-style shooter, and the updates Therad2 showed in September add optimizations that increase the framerate and improve the visuals.
  • Janus — A quickstart library for games: It is inevitable that in the course of writing decently large software projects, software developers tend to accumulate sets of convenience functions and classes that in many cases they want to pull out to reuse or even share with others. In this fashion, slimeenergy announced a TI-84 Plus CE library called Janus extracted from their game projects, with early features for working with the keyboard (e.g. debouncing), positional easing, simple physics, simple UIs, and more. There’s a lot of good stuff in here, so check it out if you’re building a TI-84 Plus CE game in C.
  • Pony Express [C]: Candledark started another TI-84 Plus CE C port of Google’s Pony Express doodle game. Unfortunately, the images Candledark posted in September 2021 have been lost in the void of the internet, but in a future month, they put the code on Github (and added screenshots to the topic): check it out!
  • RoulCE: After about a year of development, ZebraVogel released version 1.0 of this TI-84 Plus CE roulette game on Cemetech and elsewhere. It’s roulette; what else is there to say? Check out screenshots and the download in the topic.
  • TI-81 CE - (TI-81 1.8K ROM running on the TI-84+CE): I’m glad that we’ve finally gotten up to the point in PotM where we show off this project: tr1p1ea made a TI-81 run on a TI-84 Plus CE. That is, he patched and ported the TI-81 operating system to run (not be emulated!) on the TI-84 Plus CE. He even made it capable of patching an original TI-81 OS at runtime, so the tool can be distributed without running afoul of laws around ROM distribution. Check it out, and be amazed.
  • TI-Planet's "Project Builder" with online CE C/C++: In September 2021, Adriweb announced the most recent Project Builder update, bringing the TI-84 Plus CE Toolchain’s convimg tool into this web-based C/C++ IDE.
  • Z80Test: Software Tests for Hardware Components: CVSoft has been one of the several Cemetechians spearheading documenting the different variations of our favorite calculators, like TI-82s and TI-84 Plus CEs. It’s helpful to get PCB photographs of different hardware variations, but acknowledging that some people don’t feel comfortable opening up their $100+ calculators, CVSoft published a tool to identify the ASIC and display driver in each of the supported calculators (TI-83 (and compatibles), TI-83 Plus, TI-83 Plus Silver Edition, TI-84 Plus series (NOT the TI-84 Plus CE), and TI-86) and explain the results. Further progress is to come in future months!
  • [C] CEdit editor for the TI 84 plus CE: Version Beta.4 of Michael0x18’s TI-84 Plus CE text editor brought custom color, bugfixes, and additional features. Perhaps the most mature text editor for the TI-84 Plus CE, this will also continue to mature in the coming months, so keep your eyes open!
  • [TI-84+] 9-Level GrayScale Image Viewer: In September 2021, tr1p1ea created a rudimentary image converter for his existing 9-level grayscale image viewer demo. It’s still a demo, so try it at your own risk, but this TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus continues to showcase tr1p1ea’s prowess with these calculators.
Three programs/projects were completed this month, so don't forget to vote for the best one, and see you next month!

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