We are not doing an April Fools joke this year.

Stay safe everybody.

---

Are you stuck at home due to COVID19? Trying to work/study but having trouble since you don't have much human contact? Some of us on Discord are going to be sitting in the Discord voice channel for most of the day. Feel free to join us and socialize while practising social distancing.

Join our Discord server

---

After seven years, Grammer was revived with a new update! In fact, since then, there have been three more major updates, including today's Grammer 2.51.0.0.

After losing the source code in 2013, Grammer progress died, but then in 2016 Hans Burch(ticalc) recovered the source code, presumably by disassembling the last binary and comparing it to an old source file. I didn't actually get to working on Grammer again until late 2018, but since that it has had fairly steady updates. I first documented, reorganized, and cleaned up the code, then put it up on GitHub. I started adding features and managed to rope in @NonstickAtom785 into the action with bug reports, improved documentation, and recently some bug fixes.

In the past 16 months, there have been many updates and modifications to expand Grammer's abilities. With these new updates, Grammer has now graduated up from a 1-page app to a 2-page app (16384 bytes vs. 32768 bytes), but the updates are (hopefully) worth it!

Here is a quick summary of added features since the 2012 update.

• Grammer now has a real main menu! Instead of just showing one entry at a time, now you can scroll through programs with a real scrollable menu.
     
• Grammer now has support for single-precision floating point math, including the basic operations, as well as exponentials, logarithms, trig, inverse trig, and more! Keep in mind, Grammer is intended to use 16-bit integer math, so it's a bit convoluted to use floats:
  
• Grammer has an external module system, which means that specialty routines can be added to extend the language. For example, Yeong has created a textbox module which can be useful for game dialog!
• Grayscale is not backwards compatible. Grayscale is now 4-level gray, instead of 3-level. Grayscale now takes color from both buffers, so BOTH buffers must have a black pixel to appear black (before, there was a black buffer and a gray buffer, where a black pixel in the former would override the latter).
• Input and Menu routines have been significantly modified, with Input being the most obvious. In place of highlighting the entered text, a blinking cursor is displayed, making it more obvious that input is desired from the user. On the programming end, you can now relocate the Input buffer and size. So now if you want to have the user enter a name of up to 8 bytes, you can point the input buffer to where you want the string written, and set the size to 8. The Menu( routine now has scrolling, and internally it is more memory friendly, allowing more options. An entirely new Menu(' routine allows the programmer to generate menu items using a subroutine. This could be really useful for game menus where, say, an inventory menu is prone to changing.
  
• Grammer officially has stack support!
• You can now save and restore variables within a ▶Nom(...End block, which is useful for subroutines.
  
• Pt-Off( finally supports big sprites!

Download the latest Grammer v2.51!

---

TICalc.org's Program Of The Year polls are open!
For the TI-83+/84+ category, it looks like a bunch of older projects split between two authors-- myself and squidgetx (ticalc profile).

Up for the vote are the following programs (in the order listed on ticalc.org).

Batlib (ticalc link)
Batlib is a huge library for BASIC programmers. It has 120+ functions mostly for graphics and string and data manipulation, list and matrix manipulation, compression, and much more.



CopyProg (ticalc link)
This is a small program that allows users to copy variables from RAM or Archive to another variable. CopyProg2 has a few other features as well (like line reading and reading the names of the variables on your calc). It allows you to do things like copy an archived appvar to a temp program for execution



Embers (ticalc link)
Embers is an ARPG that won Omnimaga Contest 2012. This was a really well put together game. It features good graphics, good AI, and storyline.



FloatLib (ticalc link)
Floatlib is an app that holds many single-precision float routines from addition to hyperbolic tangent. It comes with a built-in reference manual and there are some examples like computing the Mandelbrot Set.



Gravity Guy (ticalc link)
Gravity Guy is "a port/variation of the popular iphone/flash game" of the same name. You basically get to flip the direction of gravity to help navigate obstacles.


LblRW (ticalc link)
LblRW is a small utility for BASIC programmers that lets you read or modify data within the BASIC program, using a label offset. That's a mouthful. Basically, "Hey, I want to store player data in my RPG, let's store it after Lbl PD." Or you can store monster data for quick access for example
(no screenshot, sorry )


StickNinja (ticalc link)
StickNinja was an Omnimaga Contest 2011 entry that earned 3^rd place. It's basically a platformer with awesome Stick Figure and Ninja graphics. Collect coins, destroy enemies; It's got it all.

---

@calc84maniac has announced the first release of TI-Boy CE along with a video showing it off:

---