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Haha, thanks for dredging this up, I made that :) It seems quite related to the OP article. It's a library for making grayscale games on the TI83 graphical cal
by dpkingma 4y ago
Haha, thanks for dredging this up, I made that :) It seems quite related to the OP article. It's a library for making grayscale games on the TI83 graphical calculator, which has a monochrome display. The main challenge was optimizing the interrupt routine, the z80 assembly code that performed the flickering/dithering that achieves the grayscale effect, to fit within the tiny amount of clock cycles available on the Zilog Z80 6 MHz processor. Even after optimization, it took up ~50%-75% of all available cycles. Some people managed to make some pretty fun grayscale games with it (e.g. https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/331/33153.html https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/331/33153.htm...). This was obviously in the pre-smartphone era, so the ti83 was quite popular for playing games in class, and hand written assembly code was the only way to make it fast.
- andrepd 4y agoI knew immediately that the link was to Desolate before opening it :) It blew me away the first time I played it, as I was used to my shitty turn-based TI-BASIC games.
- modeless 4y agoCool to see that one of the authors of the most cited paper in machine learning also got their start hacking on TI calculators. What a great learning environment that was!
- joshstrange 4y agoHoly crap! This takes me back. I used this (or something based on it) on my TI84 SE+ to play around with grayscale over a decade ago. It's the first thing that came to mind when I saw this article. I never got into ASM on the TI calcs but I wrote a TON of TI-Basic. I spent a ton of time on those forums and posted a number of apps/games I wrote (though I can't find them now).