Interestingly, the “index of all files on ticalc.org” comes in 13th place. But given that it's not a user-submitted file (just an file automatically generated by the server), I wonder if I ought to remove it from stats ranking.

I guess we missed the article for the 1 million download mark then? ;)

Anyways congrats to the authors indeed. Quite impressive.

Yep. :-) I had been monitoring it earlier this year and then somehow totally forgotten about it for several months.

The people who made Ztetris should have called their game Tetris instead. The name is much more known so if a TI-BASIC Tetris game can get that many downloads, imagine how the ASM version would have done, had it used the original name. That said, if we combine all Ztetris versions and ports, I think the total amount of download is way above the BASIC game.

I wonder if WabbitEmu and PindurTI will ever be released at TiCalc.org, considering the 83+ emulation on them is way much better than VTI (archive support, better LCD emulation, all games works except the GameBoy emulator and BASIC games using hacked 8xi files).

Some of these files, to be downloaded that many times, is simply remarkable. I bet that when Rusty started making VTI, he thought it wasn't going to do well at all!!! Now look at it!!!

It's sad that there are so many downloads, even new ones, for that completely obsolete emulator. There are more modern emulators which actually support current calculators, still get updated and have fewer bugs. For the 68k calculators, there's TiEmu (and soon Emu-TIGCC), for the Z80 ones, there are TilEm, PindurTI and WabbitEmu.

Maybe it's just VTI's legacy status and the fact that it's been around so long. Sometimes more recent projects take time to take off (e.g. Mozilla/Firefox vs. IE before IE 7 was finally released). Plus, there's probably a bunch of ancient webpages around that still point to VTI and will never be updated. Even our own emulator page hasn't been updated since the dinosaur age. :-P

I think it has more to do with being the most downloaded program in that folder, so it gets the nice glowing "most popular file" recomendation at the top of the list.

Yeah, that's the big problem of stats emphasizing popularity rather than quality: it leads to feedback loops where once something is popular, it never loses that status even if there are much better alternatives, or if it wasn't that great in the first place (a BASIC Tetris?!).

I also think VTI's file description could use a note mentioning its legacy status and mentioning the more modern alternatives.

There are the reviews. And there is a rating system.

Speaking of reviews I should probably upload some titanium fixes to yapt to ticalc...

My review telling the truth about VTI got rejected. :-( So there's still only the ancient 2004 review saying basically "10/10 Great" (even though VTI was already 3 years old and with known issues at the time, the review didn't address any of them).

If you want to know my rationale, feel free to forward me a copy of the review. I'll be happy to tell you why I thought it was unsuitable, and how you could improve it for publication.

Sad? I look at VTI like a first bike. A ton of programmers got their start there and plenty of us wouldn't even be on the map if it weren't so approachable. Secondly, it raised the bar for every emulator to follow. And given how well it popularized asm, I think every ticalc contributor owes a huge share of thier success to Rusty's work. I'm not cryin.

Yeah I agree that VTI was the s*** back when it came out. Sure, it's far from perfect, but those who says it sucks and it doesn't deserve to exist have no idea how happy people were when the first grayscale TI-8x emulator came out (Flash Debugger, which came out at the same time, doesn't emulate grayscale and only supports 1 keypress at a time). So VTI was really useful back in the days. Now today, we have much better emulators, but we have to remember back when we had no emulator that ran on anything past Windows 98 SE and VTI came out.