Very nice looking. I think I should probably look into doing something with this too.

I should try that BBC Basic thing at one point. It looks like it can make quite nice arcade games. RPGs might be an issue, though (at least, if they have like over 500 maps).

I'd have thought that RPGs would benefit from some of the features of BBC BASIC too, such as the smaller footprint of arrays (or even one byte per element if you didn't mind doing a bit of manual memory manipulation) or the file manipulation routines (you can read directly from the archive). Of course, you do lose the integration with the TI-OS and have to put up with the slightly awkward memory allocation issue (storing files in RAM is not something that is especially practical when the environment doesn't expect to have to share its memory with the device's storage). Maybe I should get to work on a tape drive interface. :-)

Well if it can read stuff from archive (and multiple files) I guess a RPG might be doable, then. The lack of this feature is what MLC (that old Casio/HP/TI multiplatform interpreter project that never got completed) suffered the most of. To remain compatible on regular 83+, games couldn't be more than 8.1 KB before compression and didn't have sub-programs. Try to fit Final Fantasy Tales Of Magic 2 in 8.1 KB

I emediatly saw you posted this without watching the name :p. Looks good, nice speed =o
I want to see a 'basic' FPS to come out with this

To be fair, most of the speed comes from the BBC BASIC interpreter, which was written by Richard Russell. All I have done is written the interface that sits between BBC BASIC and the calculator hardware (so drawing routines, file I/O, text input and output &c).

In any case, this is an extremely impressive Tetris clone, so very well done to Alex!

My tetris game is better than yours, damn right. There better then yours, I can teach you but I have to charge!


:)

Meh, do it in BBC Basic, then I'll be impressed! XD I think the whole point was to demonstrate the power of BBC Basic over regular basic, not assembly :P

My slide rule brings all the boys to the yard
And they're like:
It's longer than yours
D*** straight - twelve inch log-log rule
I can teach you,
But I'd have to charge

Will you make it easier to create bbc programs next version?

(on-calc)

What you get is exactly what you see in a normal BBC BASIC environment (plus the addition of some calc specific stuff). The on calc editor is pretty nice.

To be fair, some versions of BBC BASIC, such as the Z88 version, provide a line editor (similar to the TI-OS program editor). My problem is that I haven't found a way to hook into BBC BASIC's tokeniser/detokeniser. Of course, this could be rewritten, but would require a lot of work and take up a lot of ROM space - and it's tight enough in three app pages as it is.

If someone else wished to write an editor the program file format and tokens are documented in the appendices of the manual.

Because BBC files are interpreted, does that mean files can exceed the 8k memory limit?

There is no 8.8K "limit" in the conventional sense, no. However, as the heap comes after the program in memory, you have to ensure that any inline assembly you use doesn't end up past &C000. For this reason, HIMEM is limited to &C000 by default, but you can move this with the *HIMEM command. As the TI-OS stores files in RAM, you have to ensure you've left enough room after HIMEM to store your SAVEd program.

"I haven't found a way to hook into BBC BASIC's tokeniser/detokeniser"
See Tokeniser at mdfs.net/blib and also beebwiki.jonripley.com/Tokeniser

(I tried to post the code here, but I get "error more than 40 characters in a word")

JGH

DEFFNTokenise_Z80(A$):LOCAL A%,P%
Tokenise_Z80%=Tokenise_Z80%
IF Tokenise_Z80%=0:DIM A% 4: !A%=&D9E1E5DD: A%?4=&C9: Tokenise_Z80%=USRA%
A%=EVAL("0:"+A$)
=$(Tokenise_Z80%-254)

Tetris.