Vorticon

Hey, Vorticon. Thanks for trying the game! Hmmm...how do you mean 'credits'? You want to put it for download on a website of yours and mention who it was by? Or were you inspired to create a flashy CREDITS program to put on the 'disk'? I think "GratedTopping" is cool; I remember one person somewhere online in the past told me he thought it was one of the best ID's he's seen. Actually I'm the creator of the TI Gameshelf site I have you identified as Brian C. Horner on The Hermit entry, and was wondering if you preferred GratedTopping instead... That handle always makes me smile, and also a little hungry

So where are we with these controllers? I'm running out of saliva out there

Seriously??? No wonder I can't stomach C I guess this type of code separates the professionals from the hobbyists

Oooo! Please do Writing a new chess program for the TI is still on my future projects list.

Very well done indeed! I liked your game very much Would you prefer the credits to state GratedTopping or Brian C. Horner?

I personally never got much past level 3 But then, I was always more into "thinking" games than pure arcades, especially because the personal computer versions were most of the time so inferior to the true arcade ones, and back in the early 80's I had a very limited amount of money to spend on TI games, so I opted for Video Chess and Adventure I kid you not though, these were the only 2 pieces of commercial software I ever owned for the TI back in the early 80's, with anything else either programmed by myself or typed in form Compute!... It's not until I got back on the TI scene in the mid-90's that I got to discover what else was available for the TI, eventually prompting me to create the TI Gameshelf site

This sounds like a great program for the Gameshelf site I'm always on the hunt for good material

This is actually a trickier game than first impression suggests, mostly at the higher levels. For example, at level 6 the timer is set to 10 only, and so you have to really think quickly about the shortest path to the next monster to eat in order to reset it, and this can be quite tricky given that the density of monsters is inversely proportional to the level of play. The presentation is superb and key response brisk. I am going to post it on the Gameshelf site with the next update and will give you credit for your modifications Also thanks Adam for resurrecting it! BTW, there is a typo on line 121.

This is really good news. I was not sure it did, and with previously only PC99 supporting the p-code card, I was holding out on producing projects on it. This certainly changes my outlook because Pascal is my absolute favorite language (yes, I immensely dislike C ). And if anybody gives me crap about this, I know someone on the PCjr forum who will chew you out with his arguments on why Pascal is superior

Don't know on the figures sold. But man, I wished I had one back in the days. The p-card basically only contains some ROM's and GROM's. It holds the interpreter and part of the operating system. Because that is actually what it is. Basically its a virtual machine running the bytecode of programs written in UCSD Pascal or other languages (e.g. Pilot). The implementation seems to be quite feature complete. If you go through the documentation, you'll find a section describing how to run multiple tasks at the same time. With todays possibilites (CF7+ or nanopeb, ROM/GROM PCB's) it should be possible to put the card functionality on a cartridge. Rumor has it, there was a guy who once simulated the P-code card using a GRAM-Kracker or similar device. It essentially takes control of the entire system and the TI becomes a different machine. Ideally one needs a minimum of 2 and better yet 3 floppy drives to have maximum flexibility, although one will work with a lot of swapping. Problem with the p-code system is that it is heavily oriented towards text displays and thus graphics capabilities are extremely limited. I remember having to cobble together a library unit that does the equivalent of TI BASIC's HCHAR and VCHAR. It is however possible to do inline assembly with it, so this opens up a lot of possibilities. Maybe I should revisit it again!

Here are the UCSD system disk images in v9t9/MESS format. UCSD.zip

I swear the hardware Gods must be banding against me! The serial ports on my PC starting acting up today and all of a sudden I couldn't connect with it. The funny part is that I am still able to log on to Linux on that same PC using a serial connection session. Weird! After some serious head scratching, I gave up and used an old laptop instead. The PC holds all my website files, so I guess I'd better back up everything before something else happens Worse, my IDE card in the PEB has been flaky ever since the Flexcard went bad, and now it started freezing up on me after a few minutes of use. I think the SRAM is going bad because the IDEDIAG test is giving me some errors. Reloading the DSR did not help. Oh well... I'll see if I can replace the SRAM sometime. For now, I reverted back to 3 floppy drives and a 512K RAM disk. I'm seriously thinking however to migrate to my CF7 system although if that is not 100% reliable. In any case, I was finally able to transfer a fresh copy of Dedalus to the PC, so here it is. Whew! Dedalus.zip

No, but what are you trying to gain in that case? Classic99 doesn't use any of the traditional disk controllers so its disk system does not consume any VRAM. Ah! I did not know that. In that case, nothing

Worth looking into. I'll see if it makes any difference. As for using Windows, I'm still a real hardware guy and I try to do most of my programming on the TI if possible. However, with the hardware becoming flakier with time, I know I'm setting myself up for a lot of frustration

Indeed it appears that it was... Should have thought of checking, but then it was getting late Thanks for the head's up. I'll upload a fresh version later today.

I knew that, except the program loaded and ran fine from disk as well By the way, is there a way to load programs as cassette files in Classic 99 like Win994a?

Well this is interesting... I tried playing the game under Classic 99 and I got a memory full error. This does not happen on real hardware even when loading the game from cassette without memory expansion. What gives?

(Programmer's name) -Walid Maalouli (Name of entry) -Dedalus Dedalus.zip

OK, finally got the chance to work on it today. I unfortunately could not scrounge up enough memory to create another matrix to replace the GCHAR calls, so the best I could do was update the countdown timer by 10 instead of by 1, which ends up speeding the game enough to make it more playable. I think this is as far as I'm going to get with this, so here is the final version. dedalus.zip

I already support it, it just doesn't work. The ROMs are already in there, and are presumably correct. However, it's pretty badly broken right now. It used to work up to the point of the first beep, at which point I was putting off more work until I supported disk images (since it doesn't use the normal file system as far as I know). Now however, it just seems to crash right away, probably I broke the paging when I removed the SDGROM. I wasn't too concerned since it didn't work before. I thought PC99 supported it, though. I would be very interested in supporting the p-code card as far as programs are concerned if there was a widely available emulator for it. Currently, given how few the p-code cards are, not many people will be able to take advantage of any new software... While PC99 does support it, it's no longer mainstream given that it is still DOS based.

Thanks a bunch! Classic 99 has really evolved into the de facto standard TI emulator, and it's so easy to use! Now when can we expect a Linux version

How very true In other words, we're all nuts

Is it just me or prices for vintage computer items are going through the roof? I mean it's bordering on ridiculous, and makes me think that we have a bunch of misinformed amateurs trying to dump items they have very little knowledge of and thinking they can make a fortune on. They don't realize that the people who truly appreciate these machines are getting older and know the true price of owning a vintage machine in terms of space, additional peripherals, software and learning curve, and so will be very disinclined to pay the hundreds or ever thousands of dollars asking price. But I guess there are always suckers

Yes, I figured that out AFTER I started programming the game. Whatever. The challenge here is doing it in TI Basic, isn't it? Thanks for the info, though. BR Absolutely Doing anything in TI Basic in my book is a challenge by itself.

Vern Jensen created a game called Virus Attack programmed in c99 which is an excellent clone of Dr. Mario. You can find it on the tigameshelf.net site.