Omnimaga
Omnimaga => News => Topic started by: DJ Omnimaga on January 13, 2009, 09:54:34 pm
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Tonight in our archives there are two new TI programming tools. The first one is a super-extreme-ultimate-mega-rare-and-ridiculously-hard-to-find On-Calc programming editor called Fast RPL, originally released in 2007 on FastRPL.Info by Kuda and McBeach from the TI French Team, but the site shutted down since then and very few people still have a copy of the Flash application. Despite its huge size on-calc, this program editor allows you to make games using a reverse-polish-notation based programming language (like on HP calculators), which, if you know some z80 assembly stuff and are used to RPN, can be much easier than to actually code in straight assembly, while still producing games much faster than TI-BASIC language. Unfortunately the documentation is in french but the file can be downloaded here anyway:
http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=296
The second programming tool added is another On-Calc programming language and alternative to TI-BASIC called BBC BASIC, by Benryves from MaxCoderz, which is based on an old PC programming language from the late '80s. Like FastRPL, this one is not finished yet and it is intended to be easier than z80 ASM, but faster than TI-BASIC. However, unlike FastRPL, this one is much easier to learn and program, due to the syntax being similar to BASIC language and it is still being developped. The reason why I am uploading this beta on Omnimaga, despite not being officially released outside from its original website either, is because you have no idea how much pain and trouble I got to even login on MaxCoderz forums (Having forgotten my password I had to reset it and reactivate my account. However when I tried to login again after doing so, it kept saying my password was corrupted. After 2 tries I decided to register a new account instead, but for some reasons when trying to enter a nickname longer than 4 characters it would say my nickname is too long, even thought I see new members with much longer nicknames signing up and validating regulary. I also had to use a different e-mail address due to the duplicate account protection but when I signed up I never received the activation e-mail, even thought it was also being sent to a Gmail address like my old one. At the end I tried logging in with my old account again, sending a new password and revalidating, but this time it worked! So I could finally access my old account as well as the member-only BBC Basic project sub-forum). The BBC Basic sub-forum require guests to register an account and login to be accessed so knowing the past MC forums problems due to PHPBB and seeing the problems with the upgrade, I decided to make it avaliable in Omnimaga archives as a mirror in case people get trouble accessing the beta on MC forums. Here are some screenshots and the link to the file page:
(http://www.omnimaga.org/images/screenshots/bbc1.gif) (http://www.omnimaga.org/images/screenshots/bbc2.gif) (http://www.omnimaga.org/images/screenshots/bbc3.gif) (http://www.omnimaga.org/images/screenshots/bbc4.gif)
http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=297
And in case there may be unnoticed updates and if you want more information (and can login), you can check the BBC BASIC sub-forum at MaxCoderz here:
http://www.junemann.nl/maxcoderz/viewforum.php?f=37
On the Casio side, despite being old news, there is now MLC on the FX-9860G/Graph 85 series. Unfortunately almost every link to MLC downloads are no longer working, including those on BFR website, so the beta might be outdated. It can be found here, though:
http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=294
UPDATE Jan 14th 09: Courtesy of a member of Casiocalc.org, the beta of MLC2 is now avaliable in our archives as well!
The dream of BASIC programmers wanting an easier but faster language on graphing calculators has finally come true after over 9000 days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_fx-7000G) of waiting and there's more to come at MaxCoderz.
Besides alternatives to TI-BASIC and ASM, the Omnimaga Casio and HP programming tools archives has been brought back up, altough there aren't much there. I couldn't provide the latest version of MLC for the Algebra FX besides the one from the old Omnimaga website, though, because as mentionned above, all links are down everywhere.
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Wow, I didn't know BBC Basic was that far along. Do the commands have to be typed in letter by letter or does it use some kind of token system?
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Yeah BBC does look great hopefully MLC will be that good once I get it done. It is being worked on I promise, it's just coming along slowly...
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I am kinda worried about the 68k version too, because it has been progressing so slowly in the past 3 years x.x, and there haven't been news since October :(
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Wow, I didn't know BBC Basic was that far along. Do the commands have to be typed in letter by letter or does it use some kind of token system?
It is wrote in letters and tokenized for the interpretation or something, from what I know from reading.
Anyway this gap in between ASM and TI-BASIC must be filled. :) And C, and other alternatives didn't resolved much the problem.
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Good news! The BBC Basic forum being hidden from guests turned out to be a mistake ;D
I assumed (incorrectly) that newly created forums would give guests read-only access. Many apologies, you should be able to view the forum without registering an account.
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Aah that's good. I was thinking this was a mistake, but it could have been that they wanted this to be a member-only project, to attract new members, but given the forums bugs it can be a bit cumbersome to register x.x
It's not that I hate PHPBB because it was one option for when I revived Omnimaga and moved TIMGUL from IPB, in fact it got much more secure in the past 2 years, but there are still some problems with forums acting weirdly sometimes, altough a lot of these might be caused by most mods being buggy as hell (to the point where the entire forum gets broken and the admin has to restart from scratch sometimes), and the most notable problem was when I showed up as tr1p1ea and Kalan_vod once, even if I'm just guests, and after the upgrade, that 4 character nickname lenght cap x.x. Invisionfree also had its bugs, being a stripped-down modified version of IPB 1.3.1 final. It is 99.9% secure, the only security problem being if you go to the admin panel from a public computer and forget to clear your browsing history afterward, then anyone using the computer only an hour afterward will be able to use the latest link with the session ID to access the admin panel. There's also the lack of spambots protection. But there's the bugs like the not working "View New Posts" feature, member list showing more pages than supposed if there are membergroups hidden from the list, a rare bug that causes the Inbox link to display that you have -1 unread messages (yes, I really mean -1, not 1)
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Cool, all of these are looking really nice.
I couldn't provide the latest version of MLC for the Algebra FX besides the one from the old Omnimaga website, though, because as mentionned above, all links are down everywhere.
I think I have a version on one of the computers in my house somewhere. I'll try to upload it sometime.
I am kinda worried about the 68k version too, because it has been progressing so slowly in the past 3 years x.x, and there haven't been news since October
Yeah. I've been busy with school and stuff, and other projects. Pretty much the only coding I've done on a project this school year was during winter break.
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We'll have to get working on MLC bfr...ha this summer perhaps.
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I say that it is better to have the same or possible convertible versions of a language..SO, if we could get a converting program (pc would fine) it would be great! Glad to see this forum/site being so versatile!
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thanks. Actually in the future I had plans to expand the RPG section toward adventure games too, altough only extremly good ones with some minor rpg elements or occuring in middle age, like Castlevania. But then some people may complain that Metroid isn't in the archives ;.;
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Thanks for the promotion of BBC BASIC. :) The latest version can be downloaded via this link - (http://www.benryves.com/bin/bbcbasic/button/button.png) (http://www.benryves.com/bin/bbcbasic/download/latest.php) - sorry for the members-only confusion over at MaxCoderz.
@simplethinker - Galandros had it exactly right, the programs are stored in a tokenised form, but are typed in as plain ASCII text.
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Hi benryves and nice userbar lol. It's ok about the member-only thing it's just that I had so much troubles logging in again x.x (which also happened several times over Cemetech before).
I am happy the programs are tokenized, because this was one downside of the old MLC1 project for the 86 of having each commands be made of alpha letter tokens. Because of this the programs would grow huge pretty fast and limit developpement a lot. They were edited in the PRGM editor actually
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Thanks for the promotion of BBC BASIC. :) The latest version can be downloaded via this link - (http://www.benryves.com/bin/bbcbasic/button/button.png) (http://www.benryves.com/bin/bbcbasic/download/latest.php)
Nice, I just downloaded and put it on my calculator (along with some of the sample programs too). Now I just need to read up how to use it :p
I am happy the programs are tokenized, because this was one downside of the old MLC1 project for the 86 of having each commands be made of alpha letter tokens.
Yeah, that's true. The MLC 86 interpreter could only handle programs up to a certain size too - around 11KB I think (the TI-86 has 96KB of RAM, and no Flash ROM). This was normally enough memory for a typical arcade or shoot-em-up game (for example, the shoot-em-up game burntfuse made takes up 5840 bytes, and the arcanoid game made by 4NIC8 and burntfuse takes up 2132 bytes), but probably wouldn't be enough for a large RPG. You could compress programs though to help with the size issue, but once compressed, you could no longer edit them.
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wasn't it 8.1 or 8.8 KB? Or was it on the 83+? And yeah not being able to edit programs after compressing them was quite an issue. SOmething like TI-86 BASIC would have been cool. IN TI-86 BASIC when you run a BASIC program the calc tokenize it and it takes less RAM. When you edit it it gets detokenized
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At one point it was around 8.1 or 8.8KB, but burntfuse increased it.
And it's nice that there's an on-computer BBC BASIC file editor. I'm going to check it out once I get on my other computer
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BBC BASIC is not immune from file size limitations; by default only 7936 bytes (&A100-&C000) are available to BBC BASIC. Typically BBC BASIC would use external storage to save files to and load them from (such a a floppy or tape drive). As the TI-83+ stores everything in RAM you could have two copies of a program in RAM at once; one in BBC BASIC's memory and the other in TI-OS memory (saved as a variable).
You can give BBC BASIC more memory by raising HIMEM with *HIMEM (http://benryves.com/bin/bbcbasic/manual/Star_HIMEM.htm), but this eats into space available for saving files into. Ideally the BBC BASIC programs would be written externally (and I suppose it would be possible to write an editor that ran on the calculator outside BBC BASIC itself) then archive them; BBC BASIC can then load these files into its own RAM directly from the archive.
For a real-world figure, a TI-83+ with 24312 bytes free RAM can have 21389 given to BBC BASIC. This memory would be shared between the program code, variables (heap) and BASIC stack, but isn't too shabby. It's certainly more that some of the original BBC Micros had!
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Wow that is great ben I didn't know all that. I like the idea of a BBC BASIC computer editor. Maybe I should talk to Buckeye dude and see if I can get him to add something similar to his wabbitcode IDE.
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That would be interesting. =)
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I just tried FastRPL...
Wow.
I've never seen anything as good on a calc before! It's great!
Maybe if I manage to translate the manual and tutorials in English, then it will replace MiageOS... ;P
The only bad thing is the size: on a normal 83+ it takes about half the ROM. :(
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my gripe with FastRPL is the syntax used for code, which is due to the fact it's RPN. I never really got able to understand anything about it. This is a reason why I'm relunctant about ever buying an HP calc. Imagine if even the on calc built in language is ridiculously hard to learn and code :P
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RPN still gives me issues from time to time, but I know a lot of people where it is just second nature growing up using the casios with rpn as well as the hp.
It is a stack basically so that is what you got to remember. So treat it like one.
Oh and I meant an MLC comp editor for buckeye's wabbitcode
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I didn't knew there were Casios with RPN? The 4 ones I got so far ranges from 1985 to 2003 and none does RPN. I got FX-7000G/7700GE/9750G+/CFX-9850G
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I thought a guy in my cs class had one. Well it was a scientific calc...I think.
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oh, maybe it's just some scientific calcs then. I have one but it's not RPN.