Omnimaga
Calculator Community => TI Calculators => TI-BASIC => Topic started by: Raylin on February 03, 2010, 07:36:09 pm
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So, my Physics teacher gives me a broken TI-89 Titanium.
I sent it in to get it fixed (screen broken) and I'm learning up on my 68k.
Any differences I should know about? ???
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Yea, you might want to check TIBD. There are alot of differences, built in sprite support being one of many.
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Yeah, with the sprite support your basically able to draw or copy any picture up the screen size. It gives BASIC games the ability to have nice black and white graphics, and using the cyclepic command you can even have grayscale. Now your character doesnt have to be an "ohm" symbol anymore. The one thing i cant stand is the menu bar on top that you cant get rid of. It takes up more than 8 pixels that could be used for another row of sprites. Its good for applications though. Using dialog boxes and a custom menu allows you to quickly make pretty nice and neat apps. I use it for my electronics equations and its a lot better than the menu function on the ti83+. Youll probably be using the indirection function alot too. I wish they had that on the 85-86 back in the day. I forgot, theres only one font size too. You cant print stuff out on the homescreen, it has its own output screen. I dont think its possible to print on the graph screen either, though im not positive.
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TI-89 BASIC is more powerful than TI-83 Plus BASIC, but it is a bit harder, because it is closer to regular computer languages. It supports sprites and the like. However, as with 83+ BASIC, the 68k one is very slow. I think some stuff is even slower than on the 83+ series, while some other is a bit faster.
I think the equivalent of xLIB for 68k is Flib, altough it doesn't do as much. Also the annoying thing is that it's hard to get rid of the top menu and the bottom info bar, so it doesn't look very esthetical in games. The games using it that I tried also seemed to run a bit slow. I don't know if it's because of poor programming, but if they're well programmed, maybe you may have to forget BASIC grayscale for example.
Another thing to note is that with the arrival of TIGCC on 68k, there are barely anymore TI-89 BASIC programmers who are regulary active. Most have moved to C, because C acts as a bridge between BASIC and ASM. It's much harder than BASIC but still much less hard than ASM. The result is that it might be harder to get much help. Again, even for C and ASM there isn't as much support anymore these days either for the 68k series, as Kevin Kofler pretty much scared the entire audience away by starting flame wars on french forums (which had the majority of 68k programmers) and then the english ones. I think the following news comments speak for themselves:
http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/145/145485.html
http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/144/144591.html
http://tichessteamhq.yuku.com/topic/1577/t/ticalc-org-POTY-voting-recommendations.html
But I'm not really gonna go more into details. Fortunately, despite everyone who left the 68k community because of a few dozens of threads like this, over here there are a bunch of users who owns a 68k calculator as secondary calc.
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That link for the tichessteam forum just shows how much of a baby kevin really is. I find it funny how he threatens to ban 240185 for his offtopic ad but kevin is the first one to start posting off the topic. (Although this is kinda offtopic.) He creates the post for his own little promotion of emu8x. If it wasnt for BASIC I would never have gotten into calculator programming. Coming from programming in BASIC on the 85 and 86 I can tell you the 89 is a lot more advanced. Ive actually downloaded games that were created in BASIC on the 89 and theyre pretty interesting for what they can do. I doubt that its that much different from the latest 83 and 84s but having an increased resolution will allow you to port your games and have them look better.
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Well, back when Casio and TI started, only BASIC was possible. It took a few years until ASM was discovered. At first, people would discover how BASIC can do some games, despite being slow and limited, and this is what started calc popularity. Then someone hacked the 85 to allow ASM on it. It made things better. But at first, there was just TI-BASIC. Today some people still use TI-BASIC because it's much easier to code and can be done on calc and for the 83+ there are now libs and the like.
IMHO I think here are the advantages of each TI-BASIC languages I tried:
TI-81:
Pros
variables, matrices, Y= functions, program execution and program names won't take any user RAM. Has the fastest Disp command and some other commands are quite fast considering the slower processor
Cons
Fewer commands and limited in memory. It's the first TI graphing calc after all.
TI-73/82/83/83+/84+
Pros
Easy to learn while having enough features to make decent games. Wide range of ASM libraries on Plus/SE models, some of which even allows grayscale with scrolling.
Cons
Fewer features than TI-85 and 86 BASIC and more limited RAM than the 86, altough this can be worked around on the Plus and SE models using ASM libs.
TI-85
Pros
Non token-based programs, meaning you can type commands without having to select them through menus. More features than TI-82/83/84/+/SE, such as infinite possible variables, unlike the 83 series which limits you to 27 vars, 10 pics and the like, unless hacked.
Cons
Limited memory. Programs takes more space than their lower numbered models counterpart, even after tokenization
TI-86
Pros
Same as TI-85, plus more features and 96 KB of RAM to work with
Cons
About 50% slower than on the TI-82/83/84/85 models
TI-89
Pros
Much less limited than on z80 calcs, can do stuff that requires ASM libs on z80 calcs, such as sprites and pics. A LOT of RAM to work with.
Cons
Some slower functions, programs takes more space than their z80 counterparts, even after tokenizing, harder to learn.
TI-Nspire
Pros
Very fast math calculations
Cons
Extremly limited language, even more than on the TI-81, as for OS 1.7. There isn't even an Input function (it's coming in OS 1.8) Some bugs and some very slow commands.
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If you want my true opinion on the state of the Ti-89 BASIC (or 68K BASIC in general for that matter), it's dead.
It's pretty sad when I look around and it looks like me and Hiryu are the only ones active, and that's saying something since both of us are one step away from community retirement. It's one of the reason's Ive taken my time on Landel, since no one seems to want it, or even care for that matter. If it came out tomorrow, or 10 years from now, it's going to get the same response.
Hell, I'd bet if we used the Landel engine for it's true purpose (FFVII Cloud's Quest Directors Edition.) on the 89, It wouldn't even break the Ti-92 FF7 download rate (currently 8999 on ticalc.org) even though the original 89 FF7 broke that in less than 3 months and is currently at 42900.
Hell, I've haven't had a new post on my site for months now, And it was for a site that had JavaScript converters on it. the one before that asked where to buy an 83 keyboard for an Nspire. The Nspire forum is the second busiest on my site, probably because no one else puts a forum up for them. Either no one knows the site exists, are scared to post for some reason, or don't care. My guess is on #3
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Well, the sad thing with TI-89 BASIC is that lack of luck for the TI community caused several 68k programmers to be extremly narrow-minded to fanboyism extents when it came to programming languages. Kevin Kofler brainwashing everyone about how bad BASIC is and threatening to ban everyone who disagrees with him from every site and IRC channel he moderates caused many coders to hate 68k BASIC. As a result, when somebody comes up with a BASIC game, no matter how good it is, even if as good as your stuff (or Hiryu's), you may get flamed and told to just use C or ASM else no one will care. This attitude from many 68k programmers that are or were on Kevin Kofler side has caused new 68k coders including myself to be scared of using TI-89/92 BASIC as primary language, thus, causing a major lack of interest in 68k BASIC games. Today it is worse because even some ASM/C coders left because of him. However most people didn't see this right away because most of it happened on french forums.
This is frustrating in some ways because I did try a bunch of your stuff and a lot of other BASIC RPGs before and they're pretty nice, even if a little slow. I think it may even spark some interest here now because some of us, despite only coding on z80 calcs (and TI-Nspire), also own 68k calcs.
As for forums, I think the major issue today is that the amount of TI forums exceeds the demand so it can be very hard for a forum to survive in terms of activity now. Some even had to branch out, like Cemetech with LEGO's.
TI-Nspire-wise, there are two TI programming forums with TI-Nspire sections out there, but they're both in french.
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If you want my true opinion on the state of the Ti-89 BASIC (or 68K BASIC in general for that matter), it's dead.
It's pretty sad when I look around and it looks like me and Hiryu are the only ones active, and that's saying something since both of us are one step away from community retirement. It's one of the reason's Ive taken my time on Landel, since no one seems to want it, or even care for that matter. If it came out tomorrow, or 10 years from now, it's going to get the same response.
Hell, I'd bet if we used the Landel engine for it's true purpose (FFVII Directors Edition.) on the 89, It wouldn't even break the Ti-92 FF7 download rate (currently 8999 on ticalc.org) even though the original 89 FF7 broke that in less than 3 months and is currently at 42900.
Hell, I've haven't had a new post on my site for months now, And it was for a site that had JavaScript converters on it. the one before that asked where to buy an 83 keyboard for an Nspire. The Nspire forum is the second busiest on my site, probably because no one else puts a forum up for them. Either no one knows the site exists, are scared to post for some reason, or don't care. My guess is on #3
Honestly, I would be on the 89 right now, porting over something I am sure, if I hadn't taken on pokemon purple. I want to figure out how to do some of the things you did with ffvii and make Age of Darkess for it, it would be awesome.
And I would love to see that game come out, have been waiting on it for ever o.o
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Frankly, I could care less what someone's opinion of Ti-BASIC is anymore.
I already know that the majority of the community hates TI-BASIC's guts. I also know that there is no convincing them that a good game can be made out of Ti-BASIC no matter how good the actual game is. I've seen Basic flames that make the Stuff that Kofler says look like it came from a Basic Lovers Standpoint.
The way I've always see it, Programming Ti-BASIC is my hobby, and I do it because I enjoy doing it. If someone likes or dislikes what I make, great. I could care less as long as I like it when I release it. If I was doing this to impress somebody, I would have quit a long time ago. That's the secret to longevity in this community. Code because you like to code and not because you want to be on ticalc.org's top 25.
That's also why you don't see my name popping up more often in IRC channels. I learned back in the 90's that all they do is start flame wars and I was staying out of them. Hell, the entire Ticalc.org vs Ti-files.org mess started in the #calc-ti channel and frankly, I wasn't going to join IRC just to find out how big a Dickhead Bryan Rabeler was today or if Alex Highsmith "Banged his girlfriend" today. I just didn't care. In fact, it's one of the reason's I affiliated with calc.org back then because they didn't care either.
I've just recently started getting back into forums, but before that the only activity you'll see where I was involved is my old site, bit.listserv.calc.ti, ticalc.org, calc.org (which is dead) and Hays guestbook which I flamed under a pseudonym.
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True, even in #omnimaga, where trolling is controlled strictly, things can get heated up from time to time, because it's easy to misunderstand stuff posted through text and people tend to not think what they type there.
As for TI-BASIC, I would disagree that the opinion about TI-BASIC is bad from everyone, though. I'm not sure about 68k, but if you look at Omnimaga, United-TI and TI-BASIC Developper, pretty much everyone there code in BASIC or respects it. A BASIC project today will get more recognition than a few years ago because today, people finally realized that what counts is your contribution to the TI community. That said, regardless of if a BASIC game is hated or not, I think you are right that even if only two or three people will play your game, it's these few people that counts and if you enjoy doing your games, that's what counts even more.
I take negative stuff less easily but everyone is different, and I still enjoy doing calc stuff. This is the reason why some of us have done some for so incredibly long (You 18 years, Hiryu 16(?), Tifreak8x 14 and myself 9). Several people leaves after 2
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Amen to that.
I have humongous respect for people taking basic to extremes (something of which I've never been capable myself). You CAN create very good stuff in basic, but it has limits (and so does asm, but asm's extremes are rarely met, except in calc84's stuff I guess :) )
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Doing things the tricky way can be fun.
And TI-BASIC in z80 line have some many ways to do things, that makes it kind an interesting language to explore.
TI-BASIC if made well can be great and deserve more respect than some assembly works because of the work on optimization and exploring new techniques in the language.
I think the problems in the past were people couldn't make good TI-BASIC as it is done today. If TI-BASIC at that time had some of the best works that today we have, TI-BASIC programmer wouldn't suffer much.
Hopefully some people continued to develop and support TI-BASIC to arrive at this stage. ASM programmers also benefited TI-BASIC a lot with libs like xlib.
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As for TI-BASIC, I would disagree that the opinion about TI-BASIC is bad from everyone, though. I'm not sure about 68k, but if you look at Omnimaga, United-TI and TI-BASIC Developper, pretty much everyone there code in BASIC or respects it. A BASIC project today will get more recognition than a few years ago because today, people finally realized that what counts is your contribution to the TI community.
First, I never said everyone, but there is a majority negative opinion overall.
When I got online in 96, the community was broken into three groups, (and still is to a point) the 82 users, the 85 users and the 92 users.
The 82 community was the largest (and still is) and to top it off, the 82 didn't get ASM until OS-82 hit in 97, So right off the bat that community was very BASIC friendly and did whatever it took to get programs running as fast as possible which is why there are so much optimized code out there and Basic Lib Hybrids started showing up. even to this day it's the most basic friendly of the three.
The 85 users were all ASM nuts. They had ASM the longest with ZSHell, and would jump on anyone still writing in basic, which was sarcastically great considering that this was my main basic programming calc at the time. I used to get E-mails all the time to port Punisher to ASM even though it made absolutely no sense to do so. Telling them this usually got a response of "you must not be good enough to program ASM then" or something of that nature when I've always maintained that if I was going to learn ASM, it was going to be on an x86 and not on a calc.
As for the 92 community, it was a mixed bag there. many of the ASMers from the 85 started moving on the 92 once Fargo came out, but 92 basic was so powerful out of the box that many basic people stuck to it. Also Fargo wasn't getting too many good games until much later. This is a lot of the reasons why I started focusing on the 92 so much because it was a very good language and the community wasn't so "I hate your guts" like the 85 was.
The other calcs just fed from their parent community, So the general attitude gravitated towards whatever the previous calc community was like. the 86 was pure ASM from day one, the 89 was mixed but for awhile gravitated towards BASIC until ASM went critical mass, and the 83,84 was basic with some ASM in it. When the 86 was axed, most of those guys retired but some flocked to the 83 or the 89, and their attitude for ASM went with them.
I'll agree that BASIC hate is definitely not as bad as it once was, but it's definitely a majority, even if it's around 55-60%
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Doing things the tricky way can be fun.
And TI-BASIC in z80 line have some many ways to do things, that makes it kind an interesting language to explore.
TI-BASIC if made well can be great and deserve more respect than some assembly works because of the work on optimization and exploring new techniques in the language.
I think the problems in the past were people couldn't make good TI-BASIC as it is done today. If TI-BASIC at that time had some of the best works that today we have, TI-BASIC programmer wouldn't suffer much.
Hopefully some people continued to develop and support TI-BASIC to arrive at this stage. ASM programmers also benefited TI-BASIC a lot with libs like xlib.
First off, let me say that I'm a Ti-BASIC purist. I don't believe in using ASM libs or the like for any of my games for any reason. I know that the 82 Basic programmers don't have much of a choice in the matter because the calc doesn't support things like sprites and such with just straght basic, but I always said that if you can't do what you want to do on one calculator, move to another one that can (such as the 89 or Voyage 200)
Second, the 89 community scares me to death when it comes to Basic programming today. For example, I started on the Landel engine back in may of 98 when it was still known as the Slayers Engine, and released shots of the engine back in 99. Most of what you see on http://fryedsoft.bluecrimson.com/projects/index.htm is still valid even after 10-11 years of rewriting the core engine during that time. Hell, even the game those shots were made from (Punisher X-Treme) was mothballed. It is now 2010 and I still don't see anything remotely close to those original demo shots on the 89 side coming from anyone else. I would think by now someone would have either done what the Landel engine does or even surpassed it, and it's just isn't happening.
If I had to make a call, 2000-2002 was the golden age for the 89. a lot of good stuff came out around then. since then, it's been stagnant basic wise. I'm not too sure about the 82 side of things, but I would say that it had two good times, the late 90's and the last 3-4 years have been pretty good for the 82 series so far. as for the 85, I couldn't tell you went it had a golden age basic wise since it was before my time, but I probably caught the tale end of it in 1997.
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I personally think it doesn't really matter how a game is made really, it's what is made that counts. But again everyone is entitled to their opinions.
As for the 82 community, the late '90s were indeed great in terms of program releases. Activity dropped around 2001 to pick up again late 2002, but most programs released, especially in BASIC, were low quality. By 2003 some cooler things started to come out, such as FFTOM2, grayscale package for 83+, Fire Track 2 and 2004 had Desolate, The Verdante Forest and many good BASIC games, but it was not as high as it is in 2009. 2004 knew a calc craze because the 84 came out, but with the lack of new innovative stuff, people seemed to think everything was done so by 2006, activity started to drop on 82-84 forums. There were lot of cool BASIC projects but none would get finished. Early 2007 until Late 2008 were nearly dead in terms of programming and even many forums that once got 100 posts a day would get around 10-20 a week. 2009 saw lot of innovative projects and releases and it's just starting to pick up again.
The 82 community also had its shares of flame wars but it was never as bad as TI-Files vs Ticalc and the like. We had SiCoDe breaking up in 2001, then in 2004 we had Drubu breaking up with old staff flaming each others on MaxCoderz forums (that lasted half a year). In 2004 a rivalry between UTI and MaxCoderz arisen, because both were the two big forums with opposite views in general, so there were often flame wars between each communities on both sides. That cooled down after admins started giving warnings by mid 2005. Then came #tcpa vs Omnimaga, altough not in the form of flame wars. Some #tcpa users simply got banned for trolling here and then started a libel/slander campaing against us, trying to brainwash the entire community. It lasted 2 years and eventually it came to the point where almost our entire staff turned against us and the anon raids came along, so we went dormant until things calms down.
Things are pretty fine now except maybe certain forums no longer being welcoming toward newbies. The result is several people migrating over here while the rest stays there.
IMHO, because it's the internet and because some people are more narrow-minded than others, the TI community could never unite completly. In fact, in the past, many people suggested us to merge with UTI, MaxCoderz, Revsoft and probably Cemetech, but merging all sites together would lead to TI community suicide.
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IMHO, because it's the internet and because some people are more narrow-minded than others, the TI community could never unite completly. In fact, in the past, many people suggested us to merge with UTI, MaxCoderz, Revsoft and probably Cemetech, but merging all sites together would lead to TI community suicide.
Actually, I wouldn't mind a merging. Its what created ticalc.org in the end. the only problem would be that sites would have to close just like they did when ticalc.org formed, or at the very least subdomained into the main site, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
One of the problems right now is when it was first developed, ticalc.org was the end all for Ti calculator discussion. Now it's a ghost town. The only reason people even go there is for the archive. There is a ton of sites filling in the deficiencies of ticalc.org with the only bond being the ticalc.org archives.
Either ticalc.org needs a complete overhaul of their site to get into this century. (forums, user submitted news, editorials, a better review system. Teamspeak/Ventrilo, ETC) or someone else has to step up to take the void. the only big URL left is calc.org, and it's dead regardless of what the placeholder says. I really wish Adam Berlinsky-Schine would take the site over again and start over with a new team and a purpose to merge all of these new sites back into a more tight knit community. it's still his domain.
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Either ticalc.org needs a complete overhaul of their site to get into this century. (forums, user submitted news, editorials, a better review system. Teamspeak/Ventrilo, ETC) or someone else has to step up to take the void. the only big URL left is calc.org, and it's dead regardless of what the placeholder says. I really wish Adam Berlinsky-Schine would take the site over again and start over with a new team. it's still his domain.
Ticalc.org has needed an overhaul for years, and I'm sure it's been discussed before. It just seems no one has the time or intrest in doing it.
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TI-85/86 BASIC I heard was a little slower because of bad memory management by TI or something like that. That makes people think TI-BASIC is unsuitable to program. But that doesn't mean we can't pull a good game, though.
The main difficulty on ticalc could be moving all data to the new site.
It really needs an overhaul...
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Is anyone still coding in 68k BASIC?
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Me.
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I picked it up recently, as well.
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I still write many math programs in 68k BASIC for school, but I never release any of them.
I don't do games in BASIC because I am more interested in programming the Nspire in C.
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I write math programs on the 89, because I prefer writing math programs myself.
I have made a few utilities- a timer (to play around with the time functions in 68k Basic, not because I needed one), and a custom toolbar for my z89 IDE project.
I'm not really a game programmer (unlike everyone else on Omnimaga), but I would probably make games in C instead if I was interested in making one for the 89.
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Well, I'm glad at least SOME people program 68k BASIC. You guys might want to give games a try. :)
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I didn't because when I got my 89, there was a strong hate against BASIC programmers in the 68K community from most people (they all told us to use TIGCC or ASM), then I kinda got back to TI-BASIC. There was also the fact I don't like the 89 keypad due to some letters not being ordered alphabetically. I tried writing a BASIC program on the 89 once and it took me 3 minutes to type a sentence, because I have been used so much to the 83+ keypad layout :( (I wish someone made an app that re-map the ALPHA keys to a layout similar to the 83+.)
That said I think you can do pretty great stuff in 68K basic and if you don't want to code in C it can be a pretty good language to make certain type of games. I tried some in the past and they were quite good.
Btw, there's also another language for 68K now called NewProg, I wonder if it's any good?
Welcome here, btw. :) Glad to see new 68K users around. Since a lot of people here program for the 83+ and TI-Nspire, it can be hard to attract 68K users. The thing is that some of us, while not developing for 68K calcs, have actual 68k models, so they might be interested in playing games for them. Also, since the 68K scene is still dwindling, unlike the z80/TI-Nspire scenes, there are fewer of those programmers around :(
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68k BASIC is quite powerful, but the thing that turned me away from it was the fact that i couldn't utilize the entire screen.
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One way around the key layout is to use a TI-Keyboard. ;D It can also help if you have a bunch of text for a 83+/84+ program.
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68k BASIC is quite powerful, but the thing that turned me away from it was the fact that i couldn't utilize the entire screen.
I agree. This is kind of annoying and one of the reasons I don't think it's the best language for games.
The NewProg language doesn't have this problem, so you might want to try that.
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I think Flib lets you use the entire screen, but you still cannot display some stuff like text on the part of the screen that would be a menu otherwise.