ti-99 Yathzee in TML (the missing link) for TI-99/4a
Here is another conversion from my Atari BASIC programs to the TI-99. It's a Yahtzee game. I never liked any of the Yahtzee for the Atari 8-bit so I wrote my own. This is mostly a direct port of that game except for the graphics. On the Atari I used DLI to change the font sizes on the fly which can't be done on the TI-99. But, I used Harry Wilhelm's amazing TML program for some other graphics. TML gives the XB programmer access to the bitmap graphics of the TI video chip. You can create Cartesian point graphics, boxes, circles and multi-colored fonts, loading hi-rez screens and much more. It's similar to the KXB package I used to create Uno with but with much, much more power and, in some cases, more stable.
On writing the program. Yahtzee is a fairly simple game so wasn't much to create the original game. the only hard part was the logic to print what could be scored with the roll. the -small straight- logic was most complicated. my solution I thought was rather cleaver. programming the graphics in TML was fairly straight forward. Harry has created a wonderful manual for TML and some examples on the disk. One thing to note, since TML has to, more or less, draw each letter on the screen in bitmap graphics, it a little slower then if I have just used 'display at'. still, it's not all that slow. about average XB slowness.
I'm attaching the TML package, my XBEAboot .dsk and the game .dsk. the game auto loads TML then the game. look on the XBboot disk is a program called DT. this is a directory program that runs under TML. and standard DIR program (like the D program also on XBEAboot) won't run in TML. enjoy the game. oh, I'm also including a .vbs script that can be modified to auto load MAME/MESS TI-99 .disk games etc.. from Windows. enjoy.
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