After a somewhat quiet month of updates in July, August came back with a large number of projects advancing.
That’s all for this end-of-(last)-summer update: vote for the best project completed this month, and see you next time!
- [84+CE] Block Dude: merthsoft made his regularly scheduled sporadic appearance and in just a few days built a port of the monochrome calculator classic Block Dude for the TI-84 Plus CE. Be a small figure that lifts and pushes blocks, try to reach each level’s door, and discover (or rediscover) how tricky some of these levels are. Next month, it’ll be released (or you can time-travel to grab the download now).
- C8SALT: A CHIP-8 emulator in TI-BASIC for the 83+/84+: In August, Oxiti8 returned to this project after a six-month lull, fixing three bitwise ops and preparing for a September release.
- Calculator Street Racing II: Evolution (TI-84+CE, TI-BASIC): It was another busy month for Oxiti8’s now two-game franchise of Calculator Street Racing games. After starting this second edition in July, they implemented car dealerships, special events, wheelspin and skid marks, tuning cars, and graphical improvements to races. They aimed to release all these features in a September update (spoiler alert: they did!).
- CE C Toolchain and Libraries for the TI84+CE/TI83PCE: MateoConLechuga announced version 10.2 of these seminal tools for TI-84 Plus CE C development in August. Follow the link to the latest release (which incidentally is now well beyond 10.2) for all the latest tools for C development for our favorite color-screen calculators.
- CEDISASM - an on-calc disassembler for the CE: PT_ had been very busy, but he returned with an on-calculator port of zdis, a disassembler created primarily by jacobly. This useful tool for assembly and C programmers lets you inspect exactly what’s happening in assembled code running on your TI-84 Plus CE, especially useful for debugging on-the-go and reverse engineering. If that describes you, grab it and check it out!
- CryptX - Cryptography Bundle for the CE: ACagliano released version 9.2 of his increasingly powerful and diverse cryptography library for the TI-84 Plus CE. The biggest change is that the AES implementation has been reworked.
- [C] Endless Mazes on the CE: matkeller19 first showed this TI-84 Plus CE maze generator in June 2022, inspired by a personal learning journey into maze-generation (and adjacent) algorithms. They showed off a way to move through the maze and a new feature that allows watching mazes be generated. Check out the screenshots in the topic!
- macOS Monterey 12.0: ProgrammerBobSmith updated his TI-84 Plus CE shell to version 12.2.1, primarily fixing bugs. As always, you can grab it in the topic.
- macOS MonTIrey Library (Iron XCoder): Relatedly, ProgrammerBobSmith pulled some of the graphics tools written in C out of their “macOS Monterey” shell, such as number printing and input, listing programs, running programs, and more. If you want to quickly create your own shell, this library is an easy way to get started.
- Modular calculator wall display: Addressing a problem that many of us face, commandblockguy began to explore a modular, nondestructive way to display their many calculators. It’s still a work in progress, so if you have any suggestions, please add them!
- MyCalcs, a website for your graphing calculators collection!: Adriweb announced MyCalcs, a place to tabulate and share your graphing calculators and accessories. It has helped to organize what the community knows about rare and prototype calculators (and is a great example of parallel evolution: Cemetech once had a section to register your calculators, albeit for globalCALCnet).
- Oxygen [C]: Alvajoy123 showed the first version of his Xenon shell’s GUI library, pulled out into a reuseable library for other developers to use. It offers a mouse cursor, interactive widgets including different types of input fields, and shape-drawing functions. In a future month, you’ll see how it evolves.
- PS2/USB Keyboard entry on TI-83+/84+ ((C)SE): matalog used the ArTICL Arduino-TI Calculator Linking library to support PS/2 keyboards on the TI-83 Plus, TI-84 Plus, and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition family of calculators. An Arduino attached to the calculator communicates with a keyboard over PS/2, then uses ArTICL to send “silent linking” commands to the calculator. Download the Arduino code from the topic, and share your feedback with matalog!
- Super Smash Bros. CE: theflamingninja21 showed off an early demo of a Super Smash Bros. clone/port for the TI-84 Plus CE. So far it has platforms, character movement, and a few characters: in a clever twist, theflamingninja21 is "featuring only characters that have appeared in calculator games", such as Tetris pieces. Keep an eye on the topic (and future PotMs) for updates!
- Tuppers Formula on TI-84 CSE: matalog shared an update to their implementation of Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula, a formula that when plotted as a bitmap generates an image of itself. The binaries can be downloaded from the topic (no source is provided).
That’s all for this end-of-(last)-summer update: vote for the best project completed this month, and see you next time!
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