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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else get into ASM coding through the TI-89 (M68K) and TI-83 (Z80)? I had so much fun drawing sprites on graph paper and working on random projects and games I was thinking about.

Sharing them with my friends through the cable that went into the headphone jacks. The fun of seeing somebody at my school I didn't really know getting a kick out of something I made.

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I did ASM on the TI-83 when I was in high school. Self-taught from the reference manual. Didn't know how to properly use the stack or write functions in ASM at the time...my code was a mess! Still, was quite a lot of fun with the only danger of having to yank the batteries if you messed up.

By the time I got a TI-89 around 1999, I was in college and just didn't have the time to do anything substantive with programming it.

I'd dust it off, but mine is old enough to just have the I/O port, and don't know that I have any functioning computers with a parallel or serial port for the old TI Link.

There are USB versions of the TI-Link.

Alternatively, a while ago I used Emscripten to build an emulator for the TI Voyage 200 (a late revision of the TI-92). There's some minor glitches, but it's mostly functional:

https://woofle.net/v200/

Anyone else use the hex “assembler” on the TI-83+? After a while you just memorize the hex opcodes for z80 insns...

TI-GCC for my TI-89 was nice...a few years back I tried to dust-off my IMSA-issued 89, and...it didn’t turn on. Sad. Replaced all batteries. Nothing... Then the flex connector on my 83+ started flaking out (the LCD corruption issue plaguing these...).

I did Z80 on the Spectrum.

In Portugal, TI wasn't that relevant, the dream of most students were having either a Casio FX-850 (later FX-880), or an HP-48.

TI-89 was my gateway drug to 68k. I still have it on my desk actually, tho it's been in a box for the last 15 years.

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