Okay, forget all my questions about it being allpied to the other z80 calcs. He said that other calc support will come soon. Nevermind.

-W-

Personally, it sounds pretty damned sweet.

What good things does it have over other languages?

WOW. I just read through the documentation. It DOES look sweet! Now, why doesn't he port it to the TI-82 as well? LOL (That would make no_one very happy)

Hey theres nothing wrong with the 82. Just because it looks very bad and is old doesnt mean that some of us dont want to go back to our roots of calculator programming

When he said no_one would be happy, he meant himself! No_one (the guy who posts here), has an 82.

Thanks for the clarification :)

I know, I like my TI-82, it was the first calculator I ever got, and the first calculator that I learned ASM for. The TI-85 and the TI-82 were the first calculators to be programmed for in assembly, right?

The 85 was the first to be programmed in ASM. Without ZShell, we would all be nerds without a purpose. Thanks Magnus, Dan, et al!

But the TI-82 came next ;-)

Hi guys, this is Thomas. Wow, for once you like my stuff! Just a little advance warning: I found A FEW bugs with some optimization techniques I use, as well as some of my math routines, so I'll probably release a debugged version (v.95) at the end of the week.

For once? TIPower is great, and Dragon Warrior is AMAZING. I just finished it a few days ago.

It's nice to have a tool to make porting games a quick mouse click. However, I hope this doesn't deter people from first diving deep into the assembler to understand what's going on under the hood. Assembler is a useful thing to know.

Although this would be quite a learning experience in compiler theory, being one of the compiler programmers for the other calculators.

For all of you who want this "ported":
There has been a SmallC compiler for the 8x calcs around for quite some time (opensource too!). I don't know if anyone has ever heard of it before, I stumbled accross it one day by accident. I did try it and it does work. Check out the link for more info.

Well, how about that. I think that there is no longer a reason for me no to program for the 83+. This is terrific.

-W-

Does it work on the TI-82?

In YOUR opinion, shouldn't every z80 tool?

Well, yes, of course, but that doesn't mean that it will. A lot of people seem to ignore the TI-82 from the z80 spectrum, when really, it's the "older brother" to the TI-83, TI-83+, and now the TI-83+SE.

I also like the ASM language in it much more than for the TI-83/+. It seems more logical to me, but that's probably because I learned it before I ever saw ASM for the TI-83/+. Oh well, I'm shutting up now.

How can it be more logical? It's the same language. A language cannot be more (neither less) logical than itself, as far as I can imgaine...

He is probably referring to the macros and #defines that are used with the different calculators. The Z80 language is, as you said, the same for all calculators.

I can't really comment on this, though, as I've used neither the TI-82 nor the TI-83(+), and I usually try to write calculator-neutral assembly programs.

Indeed, it works on: TI82, TI83, TI83+, TI85, TI86. Look at the webpage for more targets.

Wow, that's really cool! And it's good to hear that he's thinking of porting it to the TI-83+.

I agree with Kerm.

I'm just too stuborn and ignorant to learn asm. An easier language than asm that runs at the same speed when compiled would be great!

Even a little slower than ASM would be okay... BASIC is just too darn slow. ASM is SO fast :)

ASM is only 10% as fast if you add the grayscale library.

I think you mean 10% FASTER, or 110% as fast. (Unless you mean ASM is 1/10 the speed of BASIC, in which case you would merely be wrong.)

I think He means that if you have greyscale going on, your asm program will be 1/10 of normal asm program speed.


-I am the one and only cheerio

I would think that it wouldn't be any slower than 1/x of the original speed, where x is the number of grayscale levels. Of course, I don't know ASM, so my opinion is fairly worthless. :-)

I've never used grayscale on z80 (mainly because grayscale on a TI-82 doesn't really work). But, I can understand why it would slow it down. I program in C for the TI-89, and grayscale slows down the performance, somewhat...

BASIC GRAYSCALE R0X0RZ!

Yeah... it'd be more of bluescale. That's the only reason I don't like the 82 is because of that awful screen.

Well, the TI-82 has COLOR! Blue on a green background. How funky is that? None of the other calcs can do that ;-)

except the 92

or the TI-83a

Unless you use the user interrupt routine.

Yeah, basic is too slow. If you need proof, check out my StarCraft Beta. Slow as a snail.

Well, since we're on the subject of different languages to asm like speed, did EZASM work for anyone here?