BJGuillot

Hi Bill. I never finished cleaning that code up. Needed a lot more testing and enhancements. Back when I was putting it together I was doing my actual development on bare metal with EA and it was painful. The code kept getting corrupted on my NanoPEB's CF card. I later started playing with development on my Mac using the Python assembler tools, but never moved the encryption code to that environment. If there is interest, I can go look for it but it's in an unfinished and very raw state last time I looked at it.

Listened to this last night. Very nice. Didn't realize so many games used classical music, and was surprised to see one of the titles use the classical track to the Commodore 64 TV advertisements (Bach's Two-Part Invention #13). Agree with FarmerPotato on needing to get "The Attack" in there. The music from that game still haunts me 35+ years later.

As a kid, I only had four cartridges: Q-Bert, The Attack, Alien Addition, and Scholastic Spelling (don't remember which level). I didn't own any of the software development tools other than the built-in BASIC. I had a nearby neighbor that had Extended BASIC that I borrowed for a little while. Out of the ones I owned, Q-Bert was my favorite.

Did anyone ever suggest holding the meeting at the Seattle Living Computer Museum? I know a lot of you are in the Portland area, though. FYI, the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest (VCF PNW) is having their 2020 meeting there in March 21-22nd: VCF PNW 2020 Meeting

I'm trying to use TI BASIC to play with the PI.TCP capabilities as demonstrated in the https://github.com/jedimatt42/tipi/blob/master/examples/tests/basic/get.bassample, but I'm running into a problem in which the TI/TIPI seems to hang and I am never able to receive any INPUT. Even if I type the INPUT statements and loop out the program and just do the PRINT #1 statements, TI BASIC end the program with "** DONE **" but the screen stays green in color but never returns to the ">" prompt. My PI-Version is "1.0betav018" but I had tried using the 016 version before upgrading and ran into the same problem. The TIPI in general seems to have network connectivity, i.e., I can fire up and use CHATTI by doing call tipi("PI.http://myti99.com/CHATTI") from TI BASIC. Is there an easy way to transfer the get.bas sample from GitHub directly into a usable file on my TIPI?

See post #37 from the F18A programming thread. There is a "hard way" section down in the "spoiler" section of that message that has code needed to do a F18A detection that should work everywhere. My QR code program used that code to be F18A aware.

Looking forward to seeing all you guys again next month.

Wow. This is really nice!

Interesting. I just checked my QR Code generator source, and it looks like I used INCT just 2 times (and 1 of those wasn't code I wrote, but a copy of GPLLNK routine), and used DECT 9 times. That reminds me that I probably should put up the assembly language code for my QR Code generator up on GitHub soon before I have a disk crash or something. I've been meaning to do it, but was a bit embarrassed by how spaghetti-like it is. Though I just just go ahead and put it up as-is this weekend.

I love math "hacks". Thanks for the clear examples. Also, thanks for a nice real-life use of the INCT instruction. I rarely find myself using it and always thought it was a bit odd to be included in the CPU.

How does the speed of Cortex BASIC compare to TI BASIC? I believe Cortex runs from a ROM cartridge (so no GROM and GPL bottlenecks), but not sure if it runs just off VDP RAM or uses 32KB expanded memory. Also, not sure if it uses floating point for all variables or if it has integer specific variable support. I don't really know much about it and might have details wrong, but it could be a useful data point to understand what is really causing TI BASIC to be so slow.

OK, well, I too have just booked a room at the Best Western. I'll be staying there just Saturday night. I'll be driving down from Marysville (4 hours away) very early Saturday morning, and then driving back Sunday not-as-early morning. Last year, I did it as a same-day trip. It was do'able, but just barely. It was actually a very nice drive down, but on the drive back, I encountered a ton of traffic in Tacoma. I think it will be a nicer experience not doing both parts of the drive in the same day. Looking forward to seeing everyone there in a few weeks.

My first thought was a spell checker feature for a word processor. The wordlist file on a Mac, /usr/share/dict/words, appears to be about 2.5 MB in size (uncompressed). However, as I think about it, the main part of a word list is unchanging, so this could probably be put in a bank-switched ROM. My next thought would be a text file viewing application like the old MS-DOS list.com program. The text viewer could load large ASCII files into memory and allow the user to search for strings and randomly page up/down through the file at blazing speed. To do this with only 32 KB of RAM, for large files, would require paging/chunking the file from disk. For just viewing, that might not be so bad, but for searching, it could cause a lot of disk thrashing. If the whole file were loaded into memory, it's much easier.

I admit, when I first thought about writing programs for the TI, I considered the ability to run on an unexpanded console a prime objective. Part of this was because, when I first started seriously thinking about it, NanoPEB and CF7's were out of production, and one of the only ways to get the 32 KB memory expansion was with the real PEB which presents challenges for lots of different reasons. But with with the NanoPEB, CF7, and new 32 KB sidecar in production, that no longer seems to be as big of a deal. Anyone who wants 32 KB can find a way to do it now. Plus, it's just so much easier to write code that uses real memory instead of VDP memory. By the way, does anyone know what the chances might be for a Super Sidecar Memory Expansion? (Same form factor as the 32 KB sidecar, but with with 1 MB of memory and the functionality of the Super AMS board.) That would really open the floodgates to all kinds of crazy programs.

Very interesting approach. For my cryptography project that I'm (slowly) working on using TMS-9900 assembly, designing it so that it could run on the F18A could open it up to be usable on many other platforms other than the TI (without having to recode the whole thing in 6502 or Z80 assembly). Are you able to comment on the relative size of the non-TI F18A user community? (Preferably devices that have keyboards and peripherals and not game-only consoles.) I assume the TI community is about 1,000 people (827 members on the Facebook page). Not sure how many of them are F18A, though. 10%?