Oh wow don't remind me about my first Garbage Collect message

The first time ever, I got scared. The word Garbage seemed like it was to delete the entire calc content. I went to check the manual immediately to make sure.

As for drummist calculator, I don't remember if it works anymore. If you can find the old contest poll topic, I think he mentionned about it, but it was several months ago.

ROL2 is The Reign Of Legends 2, one of my old calculator RPG

. The 3rd game was featured on ticalc.org, because it had better graphics, but it's much shorter and less complete than ROL2. Here are ROL2 problems, though:

-It was coded during Summer 2003. Back in 2003, when you did not close quotes and parhentesises, you were considered as a TI-BASIC god. Using special chars not accessible normally in BASIC made you look cool, Text(-1 was nearly a secret and nobody knew that Lbl/Gotos caused memory leaks when exiting a block/loop with them. In other words, back in 2003, such game was considered as coding mastepiece, but since TI|BD opened, it's scary to look at the code. This also means: prepare for some ERR:MEMORYs.
-Back in 2003, Kevtiva shutted down and never uploaded Flash Gordon on ticalc.org. No one knew FFTOM2 (Final Fantasy 2: Tales Of Magic) included a copy. Back then, FG was the only utility that allowed BASIC programmers to copy archived programs to temporary RAM files.
-United-TI had 5000 posts and still had a calc-related horror stories sub-forum.

One of these days, that game will need a rewrite and a new translation. I don't know about changing graphics, though.

it's impossible to figure out when an ERR:Version will happen. It seems very random. ALl you can do is group your files twice or three times in a row and hope one of the group will work fine.

It's Texas Instruments buggy OSes fault. It seems like the only good alternative to that is to have two calcs and backup your stuff on the other calc before testing. Sending the stuff to the computer is not 100% reliable, since files can corrupt when sent on the computer. You really need to double-check your backups when you do any, unfortunately

That only shows 134 characters I think, not 208.

I think after 100000 or 200000 flash chip writes it wears off, but so far we only heard about one person who had this happen since the first flash calcs came out in 1998 and it was Drummist (the pure BASIC contest winner). I guess it shouldn't be too bad if you don't need to duplicate programs way too often.

That said, garbage collecting every few minutes can drain battery power a lot, though. To play through ROL2 you had to go through 2 sets of AAAs to beat the game (I still wish I knew about Flash Gordon or that XCOPY was out when I made that game...)

If you want good speed and continuous sidescrolling in Basic, your best bet is still homescreen graphics, which arnt as bad as you might think with good character choices.  Are you doing omni directional or just left and right?

Oh, and if you do the home screen approach then there are ways of actually altering the font to look like good sprites (this is using assembly utilities though). Depends on your definition of "pure BASIC."