Projects of the Month: January 2022
Published by KermMartian
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January 2022 was a particularly good month for Cemetech projects, in no small part due to our members having time to pick up projects over the winter break from school or work. We saw rapid progress on games, shells, audio libraries, and much more, for calculators and computers. The updated projects:
- A transliterator on the CE: Privacy_Dragon completed and released this project to the Cemetech Archives, allowing users to transliterate text into five writing systems: Elder Futhark (Runes), Nyctograph, Ogham, Phoenician, and Proto-Sinaitic.
- BallzCE: PT_ took off his administrator hat for a moment to build this C game for the TI-84 Plus CE. It takes some gameplay elements from Arkanoid/Block Breaker-type games, from Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move-type games, and others. You fire a stream of balls at a point on the screen, attempting to erase a group of blocks: every time a ball hits a block, the number written on it is decremented, until at 0 it disappears. Check out this unique arcade game in the topic, and encourage PT_ to continue the game!
- Catylizm [TI-84+ CE] [C]: In January 2022, Spenceboy98 returned to this game after time spent on his other projects, polishing the graphics in this cat-themed winning entry to Cemetech Contest 13. The improvements even sped the game up! Check it out in the topic, and bug Spenceboy to push the updates to the published game!
- CEleste: commandblockguy released a couple of updates this month, adding a practice mode for speedrunners, implementing saving on exit, and fixing a variety of bugs. And now CEleste has won the Cemetech Projects of the Year 2021: even more reason to take it for a spin on your TI-84 Plus CE!
- DuckHunt Development [C]: Alvajoy123 started a port of the NES classic Duck Hunt, publishing concept art of how the game could look on a 320x240-pixel screen, rapidly iterated on a prototype from simple placeholder boxes for the ducks to sprites, added a menu, and solved bugs.
- Elimination: An RPG inspired by Earthbound / Pokemon: Hot_Dog planned to release this monochrome TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus RPG on January 31, 2022, but decided to also port it to the color-screen TI-84 Plus CE, delayed the final release. Hot_Dog did tune graphics, difficulty balancing, and UX in January 2022, discussed in this post.
- HASHLIB - Cryptography Library for the CE: This month, ACagliano release version 8.0 release candidate 1 of his cryptography library, including additional protections against sidechannel attacks and two new algorithms, HMAC-SHA256 and PBKDF2-HMAC.
- Jetpack Joyride for the TI-84 Plus CE: Continuing its consistent presence on this list, version 0.20 of this game by King Dub Dub was released this month, primarily to fix a bug.
- micrOS: another shell for TI-84 PCE [ON PAUSE]: nanobot567 began experimenting with building a TI-BASIC shell for the TI-84 Plus CE at the beginning of 2022, and made some progress before discovering some of the limitations of TI-BASIC for writing shells. This project remains on hold.
- Pony Express [C]: Candledark's clone of the Pony Express Google Doodle progressed forward this month, but the image host they used has lost their screenshots. Nevertheless, the Github repo remains.
- potatoscript: an esoteric programming language: nanobot567 tried their hand at an esolang, resembling Befunge or Unlambda and with a parser written in Python. They have yet to collect feedback on this project, so perhaps you can be the first to provide some! Like most good open coding projects these days, the source is also on Github.
- Quest of Maybe Something Thing (pure-BASIC color sprites): DJ Omnimaga showed off a demo of a pure TI-BASIC map and walking engine using sprites and tilemaps for the TI-82 Advanced Édition Python. It adheres to the usual high standards of RPG design you'd expect from DJ Omnimaga, and like some of the other paused projects on this list, could use some encouragement and feedback to get to the next step.
- RISK on the CE [C]: matkeller19 showed off a tech demo of a RISK port, including a cool tech demo that uses a fixed map and palette-swapping tricks to color each territory.
- Snorlax's Lunch Time port to TI-84+ CE: TIny_Hacker announced a TI-84 Plus CE port of this past TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus PotM game, taking the unusual step of making it a faithful port, large green-and-gray pixels and all. If you're not familiar, the goal of the game is to make a Snorlax eat the food before the arrow moves across the screen, or if it's not food (The Pichu) don't eat it. TIny_Hacker missed releasing this in January 2022 by one day, so you'll see it again next month!
- Super DX-Ball [TI-84+ CE] [C]: Spenceboy98 picked up another old project, this one an Arkanoid clone, switching to tilemaps for the speed boost they provide and trying to debug collision detection. It remains paused.
- Text Encryption: achak prototyped a text encrypter in TI-BASIC, using a replacement dictionary and indices produced by the calculators' PRNG as a pseudo-one-time pad. Zeroko deserves props here for a thorough explanation of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.
- Untitled TI Audio Subsystem (For TI-83+SE & TI-84+(SE)): Crazy_Fox2 built and released a set of useful audio routines for the TI-83 Plus SE/TI-84 Plus/SE calculators (that is, the 15MHz monochrome calculators). Like QuadPlayer, mobileTunes, and similar, it provides 4-channel audio, and unlike those examples, allows two of the channels to contain noise (e.g., to emulate percussion). It also supports pitch sweeping/bending and variable duty cycles, and uses the crystal timers to ensure that the pitches are faithful. Best of all, it is designed to be used in others' programs: check out the topic for demo videos and the download!
- VYSION 2 CE: the ultimate CE shell: epsilon5 added too many improvements and fixes to list here, so check out the update post for the full complement. This TI-84 Plus CE shell continues to look even more polished.
- Xenon Development [C]: Alvajoy123's shell also made significant forward progress, especially with a command line interface (CLI). Take a look at the latest screenshots, followed by a beta release.
- Zombie Chase CE [C]: This was the month for Spenceboy98 to work on older projects: he made tweaks such as improving the graphics and expanding the game's font, and experimented with rotating sprites to make it more realistic.
- [C] CEdit editor for the TI 84 plus CE: Michael0x18 decided to rewrite this project from scratch, and unlike many project rewrites, quickly was able to show off progress. He even demonstrated a computer-side counterpart to this text editor.
Onwards to February 2022!
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