Vorticon

What room will we be using? Did someone set aside a small conference room with the hotel, or is this just going to happen in someone's regular room? I'll be leaving Michigan about 4pm Friday, and it takes me about 3.5 hours to get there, but I gain an hour going from EDT to CT, so my and my non-TI geek friend will be arriving about 6:30pm if we don't hit a lot of traffic. Owen: I don't understand how you let your real life and day (night) job get in the way of your hobby?? I wish you were going to be there man, I was looking forward to some live FlyGuy music. Matthew I believe Mr Tesch has volunteered his room and his liquor with the only caveat is that anyone needing to deuce it go elsewhere He's a bit more of a night owl than I am so won't be running anyone off early. Hell I may try and stay up past 9:30 for this one. Indeed I have. I'll even bring a card table just in case we need the space. And since I have no idea how large (or small) the rooms might be it could be pretty cozy. As for the night owl thing, well, 9:30am is actually pretty early, sir but that should get you to the Faire on time. <grin> It's starting to feel like a pre-Faire fiesta in the making. Should I bring cheese from the dairy state? Tim, this is what Hal Shanafield posted on the Yahoo site. Definitely a bigger space than a hotel room (unless you booked the honeymoon suite ). I've been there before and it's not bad and the beer is cheap "Walid, I have arranged to have the Friday night event at theEvanston American Legion Post. We can use the main room, there is free WiFi, and the beer is cheap. We will be cruising downtown Evanston during the Saturday night pub crawl. We will provide transportation to and from the Legion for everyone staying at the hotel. For everyone coming to the Post by themselves, there is plenty of free parking, a commodity not to be taken lightly in Evanston. The post is located at 1030 Central Street in Evanston. There is a map and directions on our website (which I helped design) at evanstonpost42.com under maps. There is also some pix of the meeting room and the bar. Some may remember that we held the Faire there a couple of years ago. BTW, Berry is in room 406 at the Best Western. --Hal" Walid

Owen, if you look online, there is free software out there for modem emulators. The emulator runs on a PC and accepts direct connections from the internet, then in turn converts these connections to a serial connection and sends it via the serial port to your favorite computer running a standard BBS. As far as the BBS is concerned, connections are happening through a modem as it cannot tell the difference and the experience for the callers is similar to the one from 1983 I strongly suggest you go that route in order to maximize the number of potential "callers".

This is amazing!

OK I admit it. I had to touch the screen The graphics are great, but the gameplay is definitely questionable. I smell a winner

Funny Alpiner is one of my all time favorites The vagaries of human likes and dislikes never ceases to amaze me

After one is satisfied with a particular sound, it can be added to a playlist which can then be played in its entirety. This is great for short compositions or sound effects. Editing of the playlist individual componenents should also be possible.

I don't see a pratical use either, but the geek factor is there anyway If I would do something in that direction, I would not let it return to BASIC. That way you'd have 256 bytes of scratchpad to your disposal. Would be more than enough for doing a sprite demo There is that one TI-Basic game that loads from cassette tape and uses a sprite. That was pretty clever. It was discussed on the Y! group a while ago. Yeah, my next game will be on cassette tape instead of cartridge. Hhmm, no not really That game is called Morphy by Ermanno Alekine and is available on the TI Gameshelf site. Very cool hack. It runs perfectly fine under Win994a using the included cassette emulator.

I still have a modem and actually use it occasionally However, with my land line bill hovering around $80 a month with very little use, I am considering ditching it in favor of just using cell phones and skype. I have been pestering Richard Bell about adding internet access to the BBS using a modem emulator, and he has promised to look into it. This can also be applied to any BBS outthere, and is likely going to be necessary if any BBS is going to survive in the coming years. If you ever decide to setup a BBS, maybe it can have a specialized focus to differentiate it from The Keep, such as programming.

Sounds like an appetizer to the Faire! I'll bring a wargame (Campaign) with me too in case someone is interested in getting their butt kicked I'm hoping to be in town by 6pm at the latest. who is going to be the contact person?

Nice work Owen A long time ago, I had created an XB program called Soundgen that had a graphical interface (including mouse support for the Mechatroninc mouse!) which let you set up the parameters for the 3 sound channels and one noise channel and printed out the needed values for the CALL SOUND statement as well as played the sound. I always regretted however not including the ability of linking sounds into a playlist, something that would not have been too hard to do (I may do that at some point still ). Are you considering adding the playlist feature to your program? I think it will greatly enhance its value.

I will be there, and I'm actually staying at the Best Western this year since the family is not coming along Walid

Very kind of you:) Bill has attended all the Faires I have been to so far. He always makes fascinating presentations.

I have been attending the Faire since 2006 and have always had a great time. I got to meet legendary people I only knew of over the internet, like for example when I finally shook hands with Charlie Good And the pre and post Faire festivities are always a blast he he... Think what you want of Hal, but he is one hell of a colourful and entertaining guy, and a good friend to boot! I will definitely be there this year and hope to see many of you there too! Plan on spending the night though if at all possible: believe me it's usually a very "interesting" experience Walid

Nothing I'm afraid. We had huge nursing labor issues in the Twin Cities over the past couple of months along with a 1 day strike, and dealing with this completely consumed my time. Then I went on a much needed vacation for 2 weeks and just got back yesterday. I'm going to try to get back into it soon I hope, but I am no longer promising a completed product by Faire time, because our hospital is having significant financial issues with the recent Medicaid cuts and the large Minnesota budget deficit, and so yet again I will likely be extremely busy dealing with this... Such is life I suppose Walid

Please reserve a copy for me! You have a very easy style to read and I have thoroughly enjoyed your assembly tutorials so far. Kind of reminds me a bit of Bruce Harrison's (RIP) Art of Assembly series.

Is this in addition to your CRPG project?

This was not implied Marc, because I tend to respect people who stand their ground rather than cower and hide. I have to agree with you that Kyle, out of courtesy if nothing else, should have asked your permission to reproduce your game. Nonetheless, I tend to be far more liberal than you with the programs I put out there, and really don't care what people do with them. As a matter of fact, I always encourage modifications and enhancements if one is so inclined. I guess it's a philosophical difference I really still feel it's kind of flattering that he picked your game to make a cart, and I bet that deep down there is a little bit of that in you too despite all your ill-feelings toward him Peace my friend.

I buy software from Kyle any time he has an interesting title becaude I like having a nice printed manual which is my main drive for this, not to mention that many of his titles are not available anywhere else. I am not sure however whether he is selling originals or not, but from the looks of what he has been offering lately I would guess not. I know for sure that the original authors are not getting any royalties from these sales. So what I do is simply post these games on the Gameshelf site for all to have. Kyle doesn't seem to mind, because his usual buyers are also looking for a "packaged" program rather than a simple download, so it's a win-win for all. As to the issue of Never-Lander, allow me to play the devil's advocate here for a second: This game was never intended for commercialization because it was made freely available from the beginning as a download. Kyle is essentially putting it on a physical disk and packaging it for sale, which I presume cover his time, effort and costs plus a margin. This is a service some TI users will actually appreciate, especially those not having the time, inclination, or technical savvy to transfer programs from the Internet to the TI. IMHO, the fact that Kyle is selling Never-Lander should be kind of flattering to Marc. Would I care if he started selling some of my free software (not likely to happen I'm saddened to say as I am not of the same caliber as Marc...)? Not in the least bit as I would view it as helping out a fellow TI user. Now if I was to start selling my own software, that is an entirely different matter, and I highly doubt Kyle will pirate current commercial software. So I say, if Kyle is not selling any active commercial software, why not let him eek out a likely meager living from his endeavours? He certainly is not hurting anyone, except maybe some egoes...

Sounds extremely familiar (even the ass scratching part), but my favorite hair puller remains number 2. I would also add storing nested subroutines return addresses to... the same location WTF is right he he.

I've been playing with it last night and it really does everything I need it to do. Thank you!!! One question though: Could you clarify for me the format of the assembly export file? I see 192 rows of 16 byte groups, when there should be 8x32 byte groups for each row... Walid

Wonderful! Now where is the download link?

Thanks for the offer Owen and I will definitely take you up on it as soon as I have a little more to show. This program is getting quite complex and as you said my time is rather limited. A lot of the work is behind the scenes currently with little more to show on screen other than what I have already posted earlier. BUT, I still plan on completing it by the time of the Chicago Faire Now time to fire up the grill and burn some hot dogs!!!

Where do you guys get the TIME to do all this amazing stuff???? I am lucky if I can touch my TI more than once a week In any case, this is really great news, even though I personally still program on the real thing. As Owen said, this is really a renaissance for our little machine

I'm actually copying and pasting them into a Word document because they are so good

It definitely is. I used it for the splash screen of Ultimate Planet. TI Artist outputs a color table file and a pattern table file. Using them is simply a matter of loading the file contents into the appropriate VDP color and pattern table areas based on the initial bitmap setup. This is the same as Tursi's converter. The value of Ortelius, at least as far as I am concerned, is the ability to look up absolute pixel coordinates, pattern table byte and bit offsets, and color table offset along with color information for any selected pixel. This is essential for coding bitmap screen objects. That information does not necessarily need to be exported to the assembler, and it is probably sufficient to have it displayed on the screen. One interesting feature however would be the ability to select a rectangular section of the image and be able to export the pattern and screen tables data. We could make it simple and allow selection only along the 8x8 character boundaries or really be masochistic and allow free selection. In the former case, one would need the pattern table byte offset for each 8x8 character with corresponding character definition, color table offset for each 8 bit character row and color information. For the latter case, this will need to be done bit-wise, i.e. one would need the pattern table byte and bit offset for each pixel and corresponding color table byte offset and color information. That's a lot of data, but one could apply a simple offset to it and thus place that sub-image section anywhere on the screen within a program.