In 2003, there was a TI-83 and TI-83+ RPG project in the works by Timendus, who used to frequent MaxCoderz forums. It was called The Core Of Light, a grayscale RPG in the style of Final Fantasy and Zelda. Unfortunately, it went dormant ever since and was never released. Today, the game has been released as it is now, on Ticalc.org, as the author has long since moved on in real life.



The game comes with no readme, but it is compatible with Ion and if you use a TI-83+ or TI-84+, after installing Ion, you must delete everything from your calculator, including the entire archive, then delete prgmION and prgmIONZ, as the game fits very tight in your RAM and archived programs still takes a dozen of bytes of RAM. The game is not compatible with MirageOs. I ran it only once from there, on my second attempt. On the other 3 attempts, the calculator froze, so you have to use Ion shell.

Controls are 2nd to confirm, ALPHA to cancel, MODE to enter the menu and arrows to move. If the game runs very slow, press MODE then go into settings to change the interrupt frequency. Generally, at the highest settings, the game will run faster, but grayscale quality will be poorer. It may be the opposite on certain calculator models. Do not keep the contrast at its default setting, increase it more, else you'll see nothing anymore after applying grayscale changes.

The game is also extremly hard. It is my fourth attempt at trying to pass through the guards, to no avail. As a result, I am in the impossibility to tell you the battle controls.

Anyway, enjoy an old unfinished game that many people back when I joined the TI community were looking forward.

We will probably add the file in our archives in the near future (along with a few others).

This seems interesting... Do you by any chance know how far he went to? Like, was it 80% complete... etc?

Damn Looks nice, a shame it didn't get finished /:

Heh that looks pretty good. Tis a shame that i was never completed. Is there anyway to get the source code so that maybe somebody could add on to it or something?

You could always de-compile it. Anyways, that game looks nice. Really tis a shame that he stopped

If you decompile a project, they don't contain the comments, right? I don't know, since I never touched assembly program and morever decompiling

Comments, labels, and variables (variable names are nothing but pointers) can not be recovered from a disassembly.  Another issue is that everything is considered code, so data, which is usually specified by a .db or .dw, is converted to assembly instructions.  Not only is this confusing, but if one of the bytes (for example $CB) indicates the start of a two (or more) byte instruction, it could try and read the next byte (which is actually a separate instruction) as a two-byte code, thus seriously screwing up the code.

Labels can sort of be recovered though.  In the disassembler I wrote, whenever it encountered a jump or call instruction, it would add in a "lADDR" (where the ADDR is the two-byte location of the label) at the correct spot in the code.  For example
Label:
   jp Labelwould be disassembled as
l9d95:
  jp l9d95

I got an error about missing dll files or something. (when trying Dwedit disassembler). However, it seemed to be missing files which back then I couldn't find online, so maybe today I would be able to run it. But it doesn't matter much because from what I remember on the old MaxCoderz forums (back when they were still using Ikonboard, not PhpBB) it didn't dissassemble correctly all the time and some other people were unable to run it fine either. It seemed pretty dependent on many files (it was a VB6 app, IIRC)