I've always been fond on 8-bit and chiptune songs. It's frustrating though, because there aren't many artists actively making chiptune songs anymore. It's mostly just old soundtracks from 80's-90's games.

Yeaahhh FoD rules. Btw there is probably more chipmusic being composed today then ever. Check out this site, or some of these excellent netlabels.

Btw I'm making chipmusic, too

Assuming there would probably be 30-40 participants max, one could simply ask the local hackerspace to host such an event.

I kinda like that tents-in-garden idea as well.

Very interesting project. If you'd be willing to connect one of the LED outputs to a line-out, I might try to write a simple sound output routine at some point.

So today I did some optimizing, and managed to shave almost 150 bytes. My goal is to get the core routine down to <4K before I add new stuff, though it seems I might not quite make that target.

@dapianokid: that "pattern" idea of yours is actually pretty neat, though a bit tricky to implement. I wouldn't necessarily create a new engine for it, but I'm thinking about adding it to engine 2 at some point.

@DJ_O yeah the higher processor speed doesn't seem to create any problem so far. As chickendude pointed out, these calcs normally still run in 6 MHz mode.

Of course there is the issue of lower RAM, though, especially on the TI-84 Plus Color model (which has 21 KB of RAM),

OMG whatwheretheythinking. Anyway 21K means that the current 8xp version would still run on the 84+CSE.
But I take it the screen reso was changed as well? That'd be a major problem. I guess I'll leave the 84+CSE port to the experts

And with some help from chickendude, the TI83+ port is done. Download as always at http://irrlichtproject.de/downloads/houston.zip

HT83+ uses MirageOS, or DoorsCS (any newer shell might actually work). The song size was reduces to 1600 lines, due to the RAM limitations of the 83+. Also, the latest version fixes a small bug in the 83 port.

I'm assuming the 83+ version will also work with TI73. Anyway I have no means of testing the 83/83+ ports on hardware, so I'd appreciate some feedback/test reports on those.

And TI83 port is done already. It was even easier than I thought, everything worked right away. However, I have no means of testing this on real hardware, so be careful.

Also I found (and fixed) a bug which prevented one of the sound routines from exiting.

Download link stays the same, http://irrlichtproject.de/downloads/houston.zip
You will need Ion 1.6U to run HT on TI83.


@chickendude: Luckily, I don't need saferam at all. I just use APD_BUF as a lazy way of backing up the screen. I'll probably do the TI83+ port tomorrow. Need to adapt some port values for that, which I'm too lazy to do right now

hey you guys! i see that 3 people downloaded the 82CS build, but nobody reports back here... c'mon xD

Anyway, version 0.2 is now officially released. As mentioned previously, it includes many new features, including:

- Copy/Cut and a few other things to make editing easier
- 2 new sound routines - TIM-FX (2 PFM channels, various fx), and Mark-2 (3 square wave channels) - sound demo
- Can now change the song speed from within the song data
- Rudimentary "Live" features: can now pause or loop the current row during playback
- Simple Load/Save: can now preserve one additional song in memory

The download link remains the same - http://irrlichtproject.de/downloads/houston.zip

Also HT now has it's own website, with an extensive online manual.

I've decided not to release the source yet, because at the moment it's really messy and unoptimized. I'll definately release it with the next version though. However, if somebody wants to start with porting to 83+/84+ already, just pm me and I'll forward the source.


Now I have a couple of questions for all you seasoned TI programmers.

First of all, I was wondering if somebody had a table or something for converting TI82 ROM and CrASH calls to TI83. Basically, I need bcall/Ion equivalents for the following calls:

D_ZM_STR = _vputs? (Print zero-terminated string in small (menu) font)
D_LM_STR = (Print length-indexed string in small font)
M_CHARPUT = _vputmap? (Print 1 character in small font)
CLEAR_DISP = _clrlcdf? (wipe LCD, but keep GRAPH_MEM)
CR_GRBCopy = _IonFastCopy? (copy GRAPH_MEM to LCD)
BACKUP_DISP = _savedisp? (copy GRAPH_MEM to APD_BUF)

Also, does anybody know of a shell for TI85/86 which offers an equivalent for CR_GRBCopy, resp. does anybody have a library for this?

Another thing that intrigues me is the compatibility of 82STATS/STATS.fr/76.fr machines. Are those fully compatible with 83, ie. will a program compiled for 83 automatically work on these machines?

And my last question concerns the 83+. If nobody else wants to do a port, I might try to do one after all. My main reason for not considering it so far was that I thought nobody would give a f*ck, but it seems the opposite is the case. So anyway, here's the question: What is the actual CPU speed of the 83+? I have some sources saying it's 6 MHz (which would be great, because then I don't need to adapt the sound routines), some saying it's 12.5 MHz, and some saying that you can switch between two modes. So what info is correct?

I know I could check all this on google, but honestly I don't want to spend another 3 months comparing and verifying dodgy docs for calcs that I don't own.