Several nice programs for the TI-68k series
Posted by Xavier on 27 November 2019, 23:50 GMT
As often, today's features will be a mix of old and new content, this time for the TI-68k series.
Returning author Ralf Willenbacher, to whom we owe the great Delsgolf and nQuake FPSs, has recently produced a 89/89T reimplementation of the "STNICCC 2000" demo for Atari ST by Oxygene, dubbed NICCC89 2000. As indicated in the README, this work was done for a competition launched by Pouet.net, one of the reference sites for the demoscene: reimplementing this beloved demo on other platforms, starting from data files derived from those of the original demo, which Ralf compressed to save a fair amount of space. Being a demo, this program is non-interactive, besides the exit key. Unsurprisingly, Ralf's implementation looks a lot like another earlier reimplementation I once saw for a more powerful, more game-oriented platform (GameBoy Advance ?), apart from the fact that the rendering has fewer shades of gray. All in all, it's another solid piece of work :)
Multiple pieces of David Coz's work was highlighted here years ago, with such quality pieces as Edit3D, Gran Turismo or a Prince of Persia demo. However, he's one of the most prolific authors in our archives, and some of his other productions are noteworthy as well. For instance, Puzzle Bobble's more than 40 levels can give you hours of playing, shooting bubbles to the right places and in the right order, in order to eliminate all bubbles, which is easy at first, but gets harder as the game progresses. Note that the program, which targets the 89, 92+ and V200, predates the advent of the TI-89 Titanium; therefore, if you want to run the binary on a 89T, you'll have to patch it with GhostBuster. It worked fine for me. The source code is provided in another archive.
Before David Coz's grayscale Gran Turismo, there was Thomas Fernique's MegaCar for the 92, 89 and 92+, with simpler, B/W graphics. Thomas was one of the first persons to upload programs on ticalc.org, more than 20 years ago, and at the time of this writing, he remains in the top 50 by raw number of archives, with more than 400K downloads. MegaCar was somewhat popular at the time; at least, our archives have a section dedicated to game files for MegaCar. The most usable version of MegaCar for modern TI-68k calculators is Flavien "FlashZ" Racine's open-source HW2-compatible port of MegaCar, which works on the TI-89 Titanium. Note that the game requires PreOS, and that any remotely modern version of TI-Connect should fail to properly transfer the string variables used by the game as track files (at the time, most games used string variables for binary data), while TILP still attempts to maintain compatibility with these files.
More than 15 years ago, I remember spending some time on Christophe "Ximoon" Molon-Noblot's 4-grayscale rendition of the "7 colors" computer game, dubbed Seven Tiles. In order to win, players (2 humans, or 1 human + 1 computer with a reasonably good AI) have to conquer at least half of a tiled terrain, by changing the color / pattern of a tile to match that of some adjacent tiles. The difficulty is adjustable by controlling the size of the terrain and the amount of fragmentation. The screenshot is for the 92+/V200, but the game also works on the 89/89T, with more scrolling. The source code is provided alongside the binaries.
Article written by Lionel Debroux.
