SteveB

This game is instant fun ... and it would haven taken me days to develop! Congratulations for this fine piece of game art!

The updates of the SAUCERS / flickering looks like there is something wrong with the VDP memory setup .. are you sure XB256 is not active somehow?

I would be happy to talk about TiCodEd with you someday, but this was really not my point here, I talk about plain XB. You use IF-THEN in XB very much like in TI BASIC, only with line-numbers, where you might enter the full statement as in my example, when it is just one or two statements. It might be a matter of personal taste, but IF <cond> THEN <next-line> else <line-after-next> looks more complicated to me, compared to IF <cond> THEN <code-from-next-line>. So I left the line-number 25402 on the left and just pulled the CALL POSITION up from the line after, reducing the code a little.

25402 if af=1 then CALL POSITION(#1,P1,P2,#16,P5,P6) why using line numbers in the first place?

...or this one:

Certo conosco Ciro di persona, persona gentile e affidabile👍🏻 Grazie del consiglio tmop69! Hiki iā mākou ke ʻae e kākau ma ka ʻōlelo Pelekania ma ʻaneʻi? Mahalo.

I rarely seen any commercial product as well supported as TIPI, Classic99, BASIC Compiler, RXB, Ti99Dir, TI-MAME, ... All free hobby projects. Just don't expect someone else to develop your project. Unless $$$$.

When compiled, the length of the name does not matter anymore. An array access is slightly more complex than a flat variable, so my guess would be multiple variables. In order not to get lost in cryptic variable-names you may use TiCodEd with long variable names and assign short names for the export to XB. The table checks for uniqueness, but does not prevent you from using a short name directly in the code, on purpose or accidently. You then work with long names in the editor and short names on the TI, preserving memory where it is needed.

This is great! I have no additional hardware and SCSI and IDE are getting out of fashion, but how are TIPI drives named? I like the approach of guessing-before-asking. I also did some (V)RAM dumps to check and if you started the program with <RUN "DSK4.BISBEE-C"> you have a chance to find remainders in the XB crunch-buffer: But I would not rely on this .. and did not find any more traces of something we later came to know as a "working directory".

In order to save memory I was thinking about a game where the character definitions are done in one program and the actual game is loaded from a second file. In order to chain the two programs ... how do I know which drive the two files are on? So I can load the second file from the same drive where the first was from. Or need I force the user to use DSK1 ?

Hi Rich, I just checked if there are any new CALLs in 2023 I might have to add to the TiCodEd Package for RXB. I haven't found any, so the "RXB 2022.xbpkg" will work also for 2023. This package just declares the additional routines, so that TiCodEd knows them, not giving an error for an unknown subroutine and the auto-complete (Control-Space) suggests them. But I noticed that CALL COLLIDE is missing from your index: while CALL COLLIDE is actually file C7.PDF. CALL COLOR is now C8.

I think this distinction is okay, as all final "products" should be announced and discussed in the general "Computers" forum for people seeing themselves as user/consumer, while everything on the way to create it, should be discussed in "Development". I guess most people will follow both, but some are not interested in developments. But I would not split it further as there would be too few postings in each forum.

... and few of these cards are really good candidates to be used on a DS. Or are there people who want to actually code on the DS ... ?

or even "was this really me?" ...

That is true ... but it leaves no space left for the border, so CALL SCREEN(X) became pointless, at least there is no border, only the "transparent" color.

classic99.mp4 seems to work ... thank you!

Another demo at actual XB speed of the multicolor library I am working on... Bisbee.AVI Imagine sitting in a train to Bisbee, AZ and look out of your window ... about one frame per second with clearing the entire screen, painting the sky and 10 shapes in each and every frame... CALL LOAD("DSK4.MCOLOR.OBJ") CALL SCREEN(2) CALL MCOLOR(10) DIM A(5),T(10),X(10),Y(10),D(10) // Shapes-Address A, Types, X/Y Pos, Delta movement CALL SHAPE(A(0),16,6,"00022000000001010000020000330011222CCCCCCCCCCCC1") CALL SHAPE2("0022222CC222222103300002200000B1000003330000000E") CALL SHAPE(A(1),12,5,"00333000010000000220001BCCCCCCCCCCCB0000C333333B0033C00000BB") CALL SHAPE(A(2),8,4,"0220000000CC00112222222B3330000B") CALL SHAPE(A(3),6,12,"00FF000FFFF00FF0F00F0FFF00FFFF0FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF0FFFFF0FFFFFF0FFFFF000FF0") CALL SHAPE(A(4),6,5,"0BBB00BBBBB0BBBBB0BBBBB00BBB00") CALL SHAPE(A(5),4,20,"444A4AAA4AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA4AA44A4A44AA44AA444A444444444444444A44AA44AA4AAA4AAA4AAA") FOR I=0 TO 9 READ T(I),Y(I),X(I),D(I) NEXT I REPEAT CALL MCCLR(10) CALL SQUARE(0,0,8,63,4) FOR I=0 TO 9 CALL BLIT(A(T(I)),Y(I),X(I)) X(I)=X(I)-D(I) IF X(I)<-6 THEN X(I)=66 NEXT I CALL MCSYNC CALL KEY(3,K,S) UNTIL S=1 END DATA 4,2,55,0.2 DATA 3,1,62,0.5 DATA 3,2,24,0.5 DATA 5,7,40,0.6 DATA 2,7,30,0.7 DATA 2,8,5,0.6 DATA 1,13,60,0.8 DATA 1,11,17,0.7 DATA 0,24,20,1.8 DATA 0,28,50,2 PS: Which video format do I need to embed the video?

I did it just like that ... recorded all tapes via soundcard on the PC and then used Tape994a to convert it to FIAD files. I have to touch up some of the programs I found, Rescuer for TI BASIC is the only one I put out yet. And we developed Extended Parsec starting with a demo of an XB Parsec written in 1984. Only your compiler gave it the speed it neeeded ... Some graphics and some flight-pattern are 38+ years old. I started this whole endevour for an XB game we ran out of memory on the unexteded console. I continued the development in Classic99 and this sparked TiCodEd almost three years ago .. I might publish it on the 40th anniversary of my console later this year if I get it done by then.

I have multiple emulators and much homebrew on my DS, therefore quite some files and directories. Would it be possible to search for the ROM files in the same directory than the emulator or in ./ROMS ? When I want to select a cartridge the working directory is always /roms and I need to navigate to /emu/ti99-4a/ .. Also the "Roms found" screen could be skipped if the roms were found. Other than that ... I'm loving it and I gave up having a TI emulator on my DS years ago. So this a little bit like Christmas for me ... I just beat my own Scuttlebutt hi-score with 334 points while testing Version 0.6a. Steve

I spent an evening implementing the "write-through" ... and it really sucks. Provided someone would use the library, would you prefer a speed-up in all drawing or the ability to draw directly on the screen? Trick question ... you are all speed-buffs. Instead of painting pixel by pixel, calculating each pixel buffer-address anew (and updating half a byte in the VDP RAM), I might just INC to go down or AI 64 to go right ... the columns based buffer is so much easer to use than the VDP RAM layout. I'll sleep over it, but I guess I will dump the write-through idea in favor of a better frame-rate and update the buffer outside of SETPIX() directly. Object now or ...

Insanity is our speciality!

Or do it like I did in my WordSearch game ... I loaded the data into low memory and PEEKed it. Very fast, very efficient, at least for integer values, bytes or words.

A compromise like: ON Level/10 GOSUB 10000,10010,10020,... FOR I=0 to Level - INT(Level/10)*10 READ x,x,x,x, NEXT I 10000 RESTORE 11000 ::RETURN 10010 RESTORE 11100 ::RETURN 10020 RESTORE 11200 ::RETURN (...) This would give you a reasonable speed, at maximimum you need to read 9 levels in vain...

Simply by selecting a size of 1 row and n>1 columns or 2 rows and 4,8,12,16,... columns in the Size&Grouping:

I haven't used the DS in years, so same here ... I can't tell you what I configured years ago, but I remember that in the Launcher configuration is a "Run mode". I activated "Patch" there to run homebrew. Where can I see which version of the OS I am running?