Omnimaga
Calculator Community => Other Calculators => Topic started by: Eeems on December 11, 2009, 11:23:20 pm
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I was searching around wikipedia and I couldn't find any articles about the history of the TI community. So I got to thinking, what if the community got together and started writing one?
Well what do you guys think of the idea?
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I am not sure if Wikipedia would accept it since it isn't that notable in the world. I mean, it's not like there are millions of people who care if people made games for calculators. That said, people could elaborate on history of every websites on http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=History_of_the_TI_Z80_community as well as the history of the z80 TI community, as well as correcting mistakes that there might be.
As for Omnimaga, I am wondering if we should only include its history as an online programming team, which spans from December 9th 2005 to March 3rd 2008 and from August 25th 2008 to today, or if we should include its entire history since September 1st 2001, even if it took years before it makes it online?
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Hmmm, well they might be ok with it...
Ah...hmm didn't realize that page was there
maybe...I don't know
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IMHO for a Wikipedia page, it might be best to ask input from the entire TI community first before doing it, so you don't get in trouble with Wikipedia later. Also it would be very hard to list every team that existed considering there are some teams from which we have no more info of. Asking old TI community members might help, though.
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Yeah, that was what I was thinking, getting the whole communities input. I guess we could start posting topics everywhere and such.
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It would be cool if more people contributed to the WikiTI history and teams. Omni could give a conference about most of it. >_>
I can help with the WikiTI contributions about doubts on how to do things, formatting, spell check and clean up. Send me PM in one TI forum I am registered or over WikiTI discussion on my user page.
I added Omnimaga to the teams category some time ago because it is the only one I know actively, is active and not listed. Then simplethinker correct dates and members. ;D
But if someone has other teams, name it, I can search and add as much as I can. Maybe Sicode, Kevtiva and... but I don't know much because they aren't active any more.
The links:
http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=History_of_the_TI_Z80_community
http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=Category:Teams
I hope this gets some interest. :)
About going to the Wikipedia, it should have agreement of the community in general and a WikiTI article could give a nice start.
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I was searching around wikipedia and I couldn't find any articles about the history of the TI community. So I got to thinking, what if the community got together and started writing one?
Well what do you guys think of the idea?
I love the idea, don't care where it gets posted. =)
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Some dates actually needs to be corrected some more, too, like how Omnimaga original board shutted down in 2007. It actually shutted down on Jan 1st 2008, altough only really officially shutted down on march 4th 2008 (since there was a temporary board)
It reopened on August 25th 2009. There were a few other things. For example, I don't recall anyone ever doing a calc rickroll here before, unless you mean the realsound music conversion, which isn't really a notable release since I just converted a song using a converter. I also don't recall any staff here ever doing HP and Casio games at all. Most of the RPG section in our archives are files from outside Omnimaga.
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It reopened on August 25th 2009.
You mean 2008, right?
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Hmm, I found one link to omnimaga in the ti-83 series page, but that's all...so is it a go for posting in other forums?
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Er yeah August 25th 2008, my bad x.x
I guess posting on other forums might be a good idea
Even in #tcpa maybe
I mean, all around the community, there might be a lot of people who have been there for almost a decade or more, who have seen a lot happening, and know a lot more.
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guess I'll do that then in the forums I'm in, can you post in some of the French forums you frequent? And anybody who frequently traverses tibd can you post there
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Yeah I should do this, maybe. It migth be a good idea, altough most french people on forums I visit haven't been around for very long, so I might know more than them x.x
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Ah ok, well...we could at least put the request out there. I already posted on UTI, Revsoft, Maxcoders and Cemetech.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_gaming it does have a calulator gaming page [:
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I didn't know that wikipedia topic about calculators. I only saw one about TI calculators.
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except this link isn't specifically about the calculator community. Either way, for now, I feel it might be better to have it on BrandonW's host instead of Wikipedia for now
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yeah its about the gaming, not the community as a whole
ah ok DJ
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I think I can offer a bit of knowledge of at least the things I had been involved with in the past. Let me know and I can get you the details. I think this is a good idea to have some place where our history is stored.
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Great! Thanks! Well I still don't know who is going to do all the compiling of info, I personally don't have time for it (also I can't access a comp that often...)
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Also if we're going to put this on the TI Wiki, not Wikipedia, the TI Wiki is only for z80 calculator stuff I think, not 68k.
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Hmm :/ well I was hoping to put together one for the whole community...
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my concern with Wikipedia is if the article would get deleted because it's not notable enough or something like that :S, which is why I think it might be better on an actual TI site
the community might get much more recognition on Wikipedia, tho
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Yeah I'm worried about that too, but we could keep a copy on wiki TI and then if it gets deleted it will be safe and sound.
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Yeah I'm worried about that too, but we could keep a copy on wiki TI and then if it gets deleted it will be safe and sound.
I agree with that, or we could just start a whole new wiki just for the history. I'm sure theirs lots of it.. Though I myself don't know how well starting a whole new wiki would turn out it sounds like a good idea to me. ;)
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I would just put it on BrandonW wiki for now. It alerady has some pages for the history of the TI community anyway:
http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=History_of_the_TI_Z80_community
http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=Category:Teams
http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=TI_websites
The only major issue used to cope with spambots and viruses being embeeded in the site, but since BrandonW took over the wiki hosting, he updates the Mediawiki software regulary now.
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Spam bots are now deleted and stopped as they appear. And brandonw updates the wikimedia which helps a lot.
Sicode can be added as a programming team. And their archive site provides enough information. But better someone that saw their presence in first person add/correct something to the page. I will do that.
What other teams should be added? Remember the WikiTI is related to 68k calculators besides it has very few content about it.
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Should defunct teams (site shutted down, forum has no admin/staff post in more than 2 years or it is confirmed on their site they are disbanded) be put in a separate page than current teams?
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yeah it should
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Also, I might be able to do some of the french community stuff, but for a long while, most people there did 68k stuff and I did not follow the 68k french community much. I know there were very few french TI teams, though. The only ones I remember (that might still exist today) are Orage Studio, the TI French Team, the Doom 83 team and Time To Team. Most people in the french community often worked solo
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Ah, ok. Well you probably know more then anybody else of us :p
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A number of "old-timer" members of the TI-68k French community are still attending yAronet, even if for most of them, it's no longer for programming purposes. It shouldn't be hard to _reach_ them, though a significant proportion of them isn't likely to participate, due to lack of free time.
(I'm mildly among those "old-timers" myself, as I started attending yAronet no earlier than late 2001)
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Hi and welcome on the forums Lionel. Actually it would be cool if someone did the 68k portion of the french community since I didn't own a 68k until 2007.
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There is agreement to evolve the topic on WikiTI. So let's start working. :P When it is mature (in terms of completeness and agreement), it is easier to move to wikipedia, I think.
I started a discussion on WikiTI with some pending questions and suggested adding two events:
* end of POTM and start of POTY, that means a major decrease in calc stuff. (easy to get date from ticalc)
* Change of calculators popularity, exactly the transition between the TI-85/86 to TI-8x family. (variable in regions, vague and discussable)
You can see the topic here:
http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=History_of_the_TI_Z80_community
And discussion here:
http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=Talk:History_of_the_TI_Z80_community
@Eeems: check out the TI websites additions. ^^
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ah ok, well I have a few people who are willing to help on UTI, and one has made an account here so yeah...
EDIT: I took a look and :P well we should add every site :P. Hmm I'll add some more if I find some that we don't have.
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I also heard about a Program Of The Week award that did not last long. I am curious if it actually existed, though.
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I also heard about a Program Of The Week award that did not last long. I am curious if it actually existed, though.
Some googling:
http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/0/3/3025.html?p=1
Yes, there was a POTW.
About adding every site, I still have some sites in my list... It is question of reorder things to see what is missing on WikiTI. Plus see tifreakware sites list to add more. link: http://tifreakware.net/admin/link.php?catag=index
EDIT: someone explain the difference between these 2 sites:
http://www.calcgames.org/
http://calcg.org/
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In 2007, Calcgames.org went through a major redesign, but it was moved to Calcg.org and they decided to also keep Calcgames.org up with a slighter design update for those who prefered the old design.
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In 2007, Calcgames.org went through a major redesign, but it was moved to Calcg.org and they decided to also keep Calcgames.org up with a slighter design update for those who prefered the old design.
Odd but it explains. The archive is the same or there is differences?
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/me needed to bump some post
Could someone (DJ Omnimaga) suggest or add himself more memorable sites to http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=TI_websites#Memorable_TI_Websites?
By Memorable sites, it means important sites of the community that are not longer online.
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When I get some time I will probably register there so I can add or edit some stuff. I will try to remember most old sites and maybe post archive.org caches of them if they work
As for Omnimaga, I am wondering if we should cover its history from 2001 even if it had no website for over 2 years or if we should start from when Omnimaga first got a website in 2004? While it started in 2001, almost at the same time as MaxCoderz, maybe it couldn't be considered as a TI community group until 2004?
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I updated a few of the community pages on WikiTI, such as missing notable program links and stuff. I also updated Omnimaga page to something more accurate (altough it still misses the releases in the history section):
http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=Teams:Omnimaga
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Good work. ;)
You made me remember that there many other notable programs and experiments. When it occurs again to me, I will look to add more and complete the information. Maybe even add a brief description for each one and clean up a bit the visual.
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That would be nice ^^
Hopefully, later, maybe I'll get the motivation to add more info to the MaxCoderz, Revsoft and other pages. It might not be as complete, though.
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That looks great! Nice work! :D
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Awesome! I was directed here when i made a comment that I wanted to learn the history of the calc programming community. I already PMed DJ for info earlier, but I hope this can someday be a reality o.o Even if it takes a few years, the amount of history available could make for a huge document o.o
EDIT: I necroposted >.>
EDIT2: So that I don't go off and email more people that have been contacted, has anybody contacted others for an interview or anything yet?
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Someone should update the WikiTI page?
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Oh dear, I don't even know where to begin. That is just like a timeline of events, right? I wanted to see if I could get into the stuff like the politics and meanings of certain events. Even if it is just little stuff like the nDoom policy here or if there is anything elsewhere.
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What exactly do you want to know? There are still a few longtimers around.
Does anyone remember when ticalc took down the FTP part of the site? I still remember the (user)names of a lot of the people (and spammers ;)) who used to go to ticalc from maybe 2000-2003 (when i sorta dropped out). I remember wishing that i had a "19XXX" user ID (i'm 21051) :P
Also, i never knew that Alex Highsmith (Dying Eyes!) founded TI-Files. I don't think i ever actually got to go there, i remember waiting forever and ever for the new and improved "version 2" of TI-Files and how it ended up being some sort of adult site?? Something along those lines.
Btw, have you all played Dying Eyes? I wonder if it gets overlooked these days... I looked at the source a few years ago and even thought about rewriting it to be more optimized and add a few things (maybe smooth scrolling?).
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Things like how people interacted, what projects were going, the story behind them (the projects), who (multiple people) lead the community, what were the big events, how sites interacted, and if there has ever been site politics.
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Ah, the TI-files. Back in the day it used to be TIcalc.org, The Ti-files, and Dimension TI. There used to be quite a heated rivalry going on between those three to be the top archive site. I find it kind of amazing that TIcalc.org is still around after all this time! O.O
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Yeah I remember reading that one of ticalc staff hacked TI-Files then apologised and got fired, but then started to troll ticalc.org comment boards. Dimension TI AKA Calc.org had quite a run but it never recovered from the 2002 server crash and TI-Files never recovered from hacking incidents and downtimes. Ticalc indeed had quite a good run.
I think site rivalries tend to happen when at least two sites have nearly equal activity or amount of good releases/programmers, since both sites tend to have a few more loyal members who think one site is better than the other, sometimes there is jealousy and often it's due to clashing mentalities (such as United-TI vs MaxCoderz back in the days where on UTI some people were anti-xLIB/Omnicalc/CODEX while on MaxCoderz people were pro-ASM and defended users of libs in BASIC. The year before, fights occured too due to some people MC being anti-BASIC althogether and United-TI staff often tried to defend the interests of TI-BASIC coders while some people on MC found BASIC programmers to be inferior people.
Nowadays it's pretty much Cemetech and Omnimaga that are active the most and sometimes there are backlashes between some users due to mentality differences in some ways, although often they are fueled by one or two people and by misunderstandings (the language barrier on Omni doesn't help either). There isn't much that can be done, regardless of the site involved, plus I think having at least two different site is the best for the members and community health (remembering the TIMGUL incident in 2009).
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Cool, this is pretty interesting. So there was some rivalry... So when those calc sites existed, did they all pop up around the same time because sites didn't exist yet, or was it like people wanted to get a piece of the action?
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I'm not sure which was first. Ticalc has been around since they hacked the TI-85 I think, so maybe 95 or 96? I think they have an article about it somewhere on TIcalc. They must've all been around similar time periods. It was a our archive is better/ more complete/ more awesome then yours sort of thing. I think Dimension TI was the last to come about and Ticalc.org and the TI Files were the two that were the most competitive with one another.
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Also, calcgames.org was pretty popular, especially for 89 stuff (Tankers!). Nowadays the community is so small that i think people are just happy to see new users. Ten years ago there were new programming groups/sites every week, after a while a bunch of groups either merged or drifted away. I wonder where all the (for me, being mostly interested in 82/3/+) "classic" programmers went, Sam Heald, Harper Maddox, pretty much everyone from Void Productions, Hannes Edfeldt ("movax": who hasn't seen movax's sprite routine?!), etc. etc. And yeah, there were a lot of discussions (or arguments) between ASM/BASIC programmers, a lot of ASM programmers trying to convince BASIC programmers to learn ASM, then some of the first really comprehensive libraries for BASIC programs came out. To be honest, i don't really know too much about the BASIC side, as i pretty much focused on ASM groups, though i did get addicted to the FFTOM series :D
Oh! And then there were the infamous 6 month program upload queues at ticalc ;) Kind of crazy to think now that there used to be hundreds and hundreds of new programs uploaded everyday, for pretty much all calculators. I used to update my calculators daily with the new programs uploaded the night before. I also remember when they started a huge move to add in screenshots, reviews, etc. sometime in 2004 i believe.
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I would like to mention that Burr over on TIBD has made a start on this. He has a list of people and teams and he is asking the folks there for the kind of questions we should ask and if we should continue this venture. :)
Here is the topic:
http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/forum/t-438087/ti-basic-legends
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I really want to see something like this completed. There are a lot of individual group history pages (Omnimaga (http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=ezportal;sa=page;p=17), Cemetech (http://cemetech.net/about/index.php#about_history), ticalc (http://www.ticalc.org/about/history.html), and TI|BD (http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/about)), as well as hosted pages about older groups (SiCoDe (http://sicode.ticalc.org/#sicode) and a few others on ticalc.org), but I can't find any for the community as a whole better than the one on WikiTI, which really needs updating.
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@Chickendude: Oh man, you've got me suffering from nostalgia. :D Back then though a lot of the programs were clones of one another, or quadratic solvers, or authors updating buggy programs that they'd released too quickly. This accounted for the large backup in files being approved. There was a lot of quantity over quality back then. I do wonder where a lot of those old cats went and what they're up to now( Shame on you for not mentioning Bill Nagel or Hideaki Omuro(Crashman) :P)
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I can only wonder how many of us learned asm with AsmGuru :P Ah, and Bill Nagel! Who could ever forget Penguins (or Jimmy Mårdell's Sqrxz (Skwerks?)), before a decent Mario-clone came out? They still stop by from time to time, but Dwedit/Dan Weiss has done a lot of amazing things, too. And i wonder if Joltima 2 (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/1/19/19184.html) was ever written for the GBC...
Patrick Davidson's site has a bunch of links/info on the TI community's history, too:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~pad/
EDIT: Whoaah! Looking for info on Joltima II i stumbled across this:
http://www.emudesc.net/foros/gbc/116474-infinity.html
It looks like Joltima II was started by Affinix Software (http://www.affinix.com/) (you can see Justin there in the about page) and after starting work on it they sorta ditched it and used it as the base for a new RPG: Infinity. Check out the video's there, it looks really nice. Unfortunately it wasn't ever finished, though they said they were thinking of releasing a ROM of the game, but it doesn't appear they've ever done that. It's a bummer it wasn't finished, it seems it's mostly because the GBC started losing ground to the GBA and no one wanted to publish it. I guess that pretty much puts an end to a question that's been haunting me for years :P
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On IRC, Brandon W mentioned these guys:
Magnus Hagander (http://www.ticalc.org/about/staff/mha.html)
Bill Nagel (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/authors/2/228.html)
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Magnus was one of the old ticalc staff members :)
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Yep, Magnus was pretty important, although I'm not sure what the extent of Bill Nagel's contributions were. But, a quick list of other notable things should include anyone who was in DetachedSolutions, the histories of the major calc sites (Omni, cemetech, revsoft, ticalc, UTI and the sites that formed it, TIBD, probably a bit about some of events around Detached Solution's site and the discussions that took place there), Benjamin Moody/FloppusMaximus, etc... As for politics, the community has never been short on them. The people who have been around awhile like DJ, Kerm, and BrandonW can talk about them more than I can, but there's definitely some stuff there.
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Bill Nagel made a game called Nebulus for the 68k calculators, among a few other things. He is quite a talented programmer. Nebulus was one of the few grayscale 68k games to feature music and sound effects.
[EDIT]: My mistake. The Nebulus game was made by a guy named Geoffrey Anneheim. My apologies. My memory isn't always the best. I do remember something pretty impressive from Bill Nagel though.
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I remember Bill Nagel mostly coding for the 83, they were one of the early ASM programmers (ticalc shows their programs being released mostly in 1997/1998) and developed AShell for the 83. For some reason i remember Penguins also featuring sound, but my memory may be failling me a bit there...
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I believe Brandon said he was *the* person that brought the beginning of assembly programming to the TI calculators.
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There was also Kirk Meyer who did a lot of work on the 86 and made the awesome 3D graphing app for the 83+. They also got the cease and desist letter for programming Monopoly 86, though i was never exactly sure if it was true or not...
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I remember some of these names :) I got my TI-86 in 1996 or 1997.
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I was 4 years old back then o.o This has been going on since I was just a little little kid o.O
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For most of us, this has been around longer than we have :P
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I'm turning old in a few months D: I will be twenty !_! I will have been alive for two decades D: My life is already over a quarter over D:
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I believe Brandon said he was *the* person that brought the beginning of assembly programming to the TI calculators.
I thought it was Magnus and Dan Eble or something with Zshell? ???
Also yeah I remember Calcgames. At one point I think there was a tiny rivalry between it and ticalc due to how calcgames stopped allowed Snake and Tunnel clones with no new features, but it wasn't as big as Dimension TI.
As for the community size I indeed remember the days where everyone wanted to start new forums just to have admin powers somewhere or compete against the bigger guys. I think people learned that too many forums hurted the community though. The community was really small also in 2007-09, but it rebounded in 2010 before starting to dwindle again in Spring 2011 or so, and even in 2010 it never reached the size of 2004 again. Today the community is way bigger than it was in 2007-09 in terms of posting activity and program releases everywhere, but much smaller than in 2004 when as noted above there were over 100 programs a day uploaded on ticalc sometimes.
For the Omnimaga history I will probably need to do it myself when I have time, but for Cemetech and others sites we would have to ask their respective admins or founders. As for old stuff I might know some but I don't have as much free time lately so I don't know if I can help much.
Also for Omni history now we have the old board back so that's one more part of Omnimaga history (although back then there weren't many notable releases compared to on the current site) that is around now.
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Burr has done some great work so far with documenting since February: http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/ti:home
I have already learned of some amazing things I never knew. For example, I wonder how many of the new folks are familiar with this TI-83+/84+ game? (http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/local--files/ti:badja/lotus-turbo.gif) Check out the page on the programmer Badja :)
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Burr has done some great work so far with documenting since February: http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/ti:home
Wow, he's done a lot of work over there O.OI have already learned of some amazing things I never knew.
A few months ago I realized there's so much to the calculator community in its history that a lot of us don't even know of today...For example, I wonder how many of the new folks are familiar with this TI-83+/84+ game? (http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/local--files/ti:badja/lotus-turbo.gif) Check out the page on the programmer Badja :)
I've never seen that one, but his Uncle Worm is probably one of the best-known TI-83 Plus games of all time. And from the links on his TI|BD page, I found out that he's ported it to Android (http://move.to/badja).
That's funny—a famous calculator game getting ported to a phone XD
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I've never seen that one, but his Uncle Worm is probably one of the best-known TI-83 Plus games of all time. And from the links on his TI|BD page, I found out that he's ported it to Android (http://move.to/badja).
I've heard of it but never played it O.O
That's funny—a famous calculator game getting ported to a phone XD
Imagine that being said back in 1990 XD First, a game being made for a graphing calculator. Second, the same game being made for a phone.
And yeah, there is so much stuff that isn't known by us newer folks. That is why I am glad this has been started. I learned that this had been made for the calc a long while ago before I made Grammer:
http://tift.tuxfamily.org/projects/fastrpl
I mean, look at these screenies:
(http://tift.tuxfamily.org/wp-content/gravpong.gif) (http://tift.tuxfamily.org/wp-content/minesweeper.gif) (http://tift.tuxfamily.org/wp-content/snake.gif)
O.O
I think that is fairly awesome.
EDIT: The first is called gravity pong, the second is minesweeper, and the the third is a snake game. I am pretty sure that is all at 6MHz, too, as it was designed for the TI-83+.
EDIT2: I learned about this from deeph-- a member of the TIFT team and one of the organizers of last years zContest. The team is a french team, I believe.
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wow that TIBD page so far is awesome :0. It would definitively be great to have the history of every site, though. Also I remember Lotus a lot. It was pretty popular back then in school. As for FastRPL, it was promising, but what doomed it was how learning required full ASM concepts knowledge, which singled out most BASIC coders, and the lack of English documentation. :(
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Hey guys, I thought I'd give you an (early) Pi Day present—here are the old mailing list archives from ticalc.org's earlier days that had been taken down since 2004. There ought to be plenty of interesting, historical content in there.
http://www.ticalc.org/archives/oldmail/
Unfortunately, there isn't a search tool for it right now, but maybe I could put up a Google search box or something sometime if Google indexes it.
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Hmm, interesting. I'll have to dig in there once. :D
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Awesome, thanks TravisE!
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Google has begun indexing the archives, so I've added a search box to the page. Note that it may still take some days or weeks for searches to return everything since it has to crawl some 121,000+ or so individual HTML pages. :)
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Wow, awesome! Again, thanks Travis!
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That's very good :)
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Awesome work travis :D
Also I really need to get to work on some Omni history stuff. First of all I need to update the Omni page on WikiTI with more information, in a similar fashion as Wikipedia pages. Listing all good/bad major events I guess.