How TI-pical

Entry posted by atari2600land May 27, 2020

218 views

So I woke up at about midnight. Not very rare, I often wake up in the middle of the night. But this time was different. I decided to start programming the TI-84+. Spent two hours trying to hook up the thing to the computer with a regular USB cable. Nothing was working. I apparently need a special one. So I began looking for it. No success. So I bought one off of eBay. It was only $5. And it's supposed to come June 4. (I want it NOW though!) So apparently it's either find the one I had or wait until this new one came. I know I had one because I found some screenshots of my TI-84+ in action. Unfortunately, when I turned it on, the RAM cleared, erasing all my saved programs on it. All I did was replace the batteries. I haven't been using it for so long I was surprised they hadn't corroded it.

I looked at some sample code and I think this might be doable. I've done stuff in Basic before, but I want to go do something bigger and better: Assembly. It looks a lot like Game Gear assembly. So I downloaded some programs, but they wouldn't work at all, probably due to me having the wrong cord, which is weird because my computer recognized it was a TI-84+ when I plugged it in (well, most of the time.) I downloaded TILP and kept getting this message:

dumberror.png.e2a4dc4ff95433517fcf7a7c3370b2a4.png

Yippee.

In other news, I got the Game Wizard to run. Putting in the cartridges is a hard task. I put in X-Wing Fighter. Started playing it. What you do is shoot enemy spaceships and dodge their missiles (hey, this is just like MidSpace, I'm stuck on the lower part of the screen!) Surprise, I only got 200 points because I kept missing a lot and crashing into missiles. :roll: So can Princess Leia be rescued from the evil Darth Vader? If I'm playing it, probably not. But that's what I plan to do next.

So I went back to sleep. I had spent about 3 hours in the middle of the night trying to work on something that I couldn't get working. Then I woke up and decided to try and find that wire again. I doubt it's anywhere because I looked everywhere and can't find it. So I guess it's time to play the waiting game.