Hey, welcome back!   I'm doing OK, except that I'm really busy with school.

The Multi-platform Language for Calculators (MLC) was something originally thought up and made by a programming group called the Epic Programming Studios (web archive link), and they made MLC interpreters and programs for the Casio AFX and TI-86.  Besides being multi-platform, it's faster than TI-BASIC and supports grayscale, tile-mapping, and has a lot of commands that would be helpful to game programmers, like collision-detection ones.  The group broke apart a few years ago, but I thought the MLC project was pretty cool, so I made a MLC interpreter for the TI-89/TI-92+/Voyage 200 calculators - MLC 68K (some Casio people also continued the project as well). 

It's nearly complete (it supports every MLC variable and expression type, allowing for things like: %I+=@ARY(3*%VAR)+3-*PTR), but I still need to fix a few bugs and things.  Here are some screen shots of MLC games originally written for the TI-86 interpreter running on the MLC 68K interpreter:



And here's a short demo showing grayscale and tilemapping in MLC 68K;



Here are some screenshots of MLC games running on various interpreters, and here is some general information about MLC as part of some documentation I'm working on.

I also started working on an on-computer IDE for MLC which will be able to generate MLC programs for all supported calculators in the appropriate file formats (.86p for TI-86 MLC programs, etc.)

Download MLC 68K Alpha 1 - MLC sample programs (written by the Epic Programming Studios) included - MLC programs on 68K calculators are stored as text files and can be ran on the homescreen by doing: mlc2("progname").

Note that I don't think any of the sample programs work completely, so if anybody could figure out what exactly is causing them to not work, that'd be great.   And remember, there's some online documentation that's nearly complete here if you need help getting started programming with MLC.

Hopefully I'll have a new release within a few weeks of MLC 68K that has some bugs fixed, is compressed, has a "tokenizer" for smaller and faster programs, and has better key layouts on the TI-92+ and Voyage 200.

Looks great!  I hope you're able to handle all of your work.

Get it if you really think it will be worth the money.  HP and Casio make some pretty good calculators, and in terms of hardware, they are generally better than TI's.  But do you really need it?  Are there some programs for it that you really want to try?  Do you plan to program for it?  If so, note that you'd be programming for a much smaller user base (and, in turn, there are probably less programs available for it).

I mean, yes, it's cool, it has good hardware and an SD card slot, but think about if you going to actually use it, or just let it sit around and admire it on occasion.  Whatever TI calculator you have - I'm guessing a TI-83+ or TI-84+ - can probably do whatever you need to do (and if not, then there's always the TI-89/TI-92+/Voyage 200 series, and now the TI-Nspire CAS too) and you're more familiar with it.

Also, if you still insist on buying a new calculator particularly because of its hardware, I suggest you take a look at other calculators too, such as the Casio ClassPad 330 and those in the Casio fx-9860 series, and also take a good look at the Casio fx-9860 Slim.  And then, of course, there is the TI-Nspire (CAS).

That looks pretty good.  I like how you kind of decorated the border between the characters and the stats with curvy lines.

Welcome!

Although I never played Magic the Gathering, I did play Yu-Gi-Oh for a while, so I'm kind of familiar with these types of card games.

Click here for the entire NetBeans project, and click here for a screen shot.