Thank you for reading the ticalc.org newsletter! This month, we have rolled out many new features, including new detailed statistics on program authors and the ability to download readme files without downloading entire zips. Also, a Featured Programs forum has been added. We encourage you to check them out.

As we speak, we are testing a new system for our Comment Boards. Due to the huge controversy surrounding the comments on our boards, we have decided to go with a two-week anarchy trial. Until November 7, no comments will be deleted, unless they contain illegal or highly inappropriate posts. After this, we will have a survey about the fate of our comment boards. For more information, see http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/18658.html.

The Program of the Month process will start up again, starting with our regular nomination process. In order to nominate programs for the second round, please go to http://www.ticalc.org/community/awards/data/nom101999.html. After a nomination period of one week, the actual voting process will begin, and it will last for an additional week. In two weeks, the winners will be announced.

For this month's interview we have selected Scott Noveck, a member of the ACZ. He has extensive knowledge with assembly languages, and his notable programs include Zelda89, Pokemon 89, and a modified version of Super TRON 89. Scott is currently working on many projects, most notably Plane Jump 89, which is due out next month.

Eric Sun

At ticalc.org, we often receive many of the same questions. In this column, w e hope to address some of these questions for a broader audience. If you'd like to submit a question, please email it to ask@tic alc.org.

Q: How does ticalc.org take the still and animated s creenshots that can be found in the ticalc.org archives?
--Jonathan Sprewell

A: For still screenshots, we take them directly in Virtual TI, a popular calculator emulator. You can find it at http://www.ticalc.org/pub/win/vti.zip. Once they're taken, we have to convert them from .bmp to .gif format before we add them to the data base. For this, we use a neat little program called Irfanview which quickly batch converts multiple images. Go to http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e9227474/ if you want more information.

As for animated screenshots, we use an in-house program created by Kirk Meyer that latches onto a running copy of Virtual TI and pulls the images straight out of it to make an animated screenshot. They are pulled out at user-set intervals (110, 220 or 330 ms) and screenshots for POTM are made with this too. Animated screenshots are already saved in .gif form, so we don't need to worry about converting them.
--Nick Disabato

Q: Why don't any assembly programs work on the TI-89 with ROM version 1.05?
--Many emails to help@ticalc.org

A: The differences in the TI-89 ROM 1.00 and ROM 1.05 cause assembly programs to lock up if they are not made for the correct version. To see what ROM version your calculator has, go to F1->About. You will see something like this:

TI-89
Advanced Mathematics Software
Version *Your Version Here*

If you are experiencing this problem and would like to fix it, you have two solutions:

1. The easiest and most popular way is to simply downgrade your ROM version to 1.00. To do this, you must email scraft@ti.com and ask for ROM 1.00. Current copyright rules forbid us from distributing this ROM version.

An alternative way is to use David Hart's patch program for Windows, entitled "TI-89/92+ ROM Patcher v1.05." It can be found at either http://www.ticalc.org/pub/win/rompatch.zip or http://www.ticalc.org/pub/win/rompch16.zip for the 16-bit version. Information about this program can be found at his page, http://calccity.calc.org/.
--Eric Sun

This month, we have again seen a great number of programs released, especially for the TI-83+. As always, the TCPA has been extremely active, and notable releases include Solytare, Simon, Labyrnth, Block Dude, Laser Mayhem, Blink, and Tetris Attack, all for the TI-83+. Congratulations to TCPA!

In other news, Sam Heald has released Ion (83 and 83+) versions of many of his games, including Z-Kart, Picross, Pac-Man, and Galaxian. New versions of Phoenix (by Patrick Davidson), ZTetris (Ahmed El-Helw) and SolarStriker (Benoit Scherrer and Brian Tribondeau) have also been released.

The folks over at Texas Instruments have also been relatively productive this month. In addition to releasing the CBL2, the long-awaited TI-83+ Software Development Kit has been released, helping programmers develop programs in Z80 assembly code. More information can be found at http://www.ti.com/calc/docs/sdk.htm. This release will be followed by another SDK that allows programmers to write to the Flash ROM.

Finally, in Windows programming, Rusty Wagner has released yet another version of his popular emulator, Virtual TI. The new version adds support for the black TI-Graph Link cable and fixes support for homemade serial links. VTI v2.5 beta 3 can be found in our archives.