Porting 8-bit Sonic 2 to the TI-84 CE | Hacker News Reader

Porting 8-bit Sonic 2 to the TI-84 CE

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102 pointsfarmerbb30 comments

oh man, TI-BASIC was awesome!! My first programming language, and funny enough due to how the programs worked, a relatively useful trove of "open-source" code to learn from.

I remember essentially cramming several different modified games together to make a game centered around the plot for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace with literally not an ounce of awareness at the irony of doing so or the vitriol for that movie at the time. Fun times...

edit: This seems like a more robust setup than I assumed, a color screen and C libraries to write assembly (!!) Good for the author, an impressive project

Nobody walked out of Phantom Menace hating it. We have the second movie and then a snarky YouTube video where a man talks funny to blame for that. And people younger than us think they’re all great.

I couldn't agree more. I have rewatched the prequels and still enjoy them. Meant more that at the time I was young and wasn't aware of the backlash. Now I'm older and still don't care :)

The Prequels Strike Back [wiki link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prequels_Strike_Back:_A_Fa...) is a fun documentary to watch sometime on the subject too. Lucas actually did have some intentional writing and directorial stuff going on in the prequel trilogy that I definitely missed even as a fan.

Where were you in 1999 when all I had was a crap snake on my TI-89?

Heck, even in 2005 Snake was all I had on my TI-84 Plus. (Not the CE, just the plain old 1-bit display version.)

And it was a version of Snake that I’d written myself, in TI-BASIC and I used some kind of matrix to store the segments of the snake and when the snake grew in length the operations to move the snake around took more and more time. Until eventually it crashed.

It was, admittedly not the greatest Snake game ever. It may even have been one of the worst ever. But it my Snake and that made it okay

There were a ton of games already available on TI-84 Plus because the ones from TI-83 ran on it. ticalc.org had a ton of them.

There were some great games for the TI-85 (and later the TI-83) written in Z80 assembly. Certainly things much better than snake. Someone needed a PC link cable to get it on, but then you could send from one calculator to another with just the link cable included in the box. None would have worked on the 92 or 89 which used a different CPU.

[edit]

For TI-89 games see e.g. https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/261/26100.htm...

I feel bad that you didn't know about https://www.ticalc.org/ . Kids in my class would have loved to have a TI-89 instead of a TI-83, since there were so many better games for it.

What is "8-bit Sonic 2" ?

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the Sega Master System or Game Gear.

The SMS had an extended life in places like Brazil which led to certain Genesis titles, like Sonic, receiving ports to the SMS.

The 8-bit sonic games were originally made with the Game Gear in mind. Because the Game Gear and Master System have nearly identical hardware (except for a different screen size and palette), Master System ports were made as well.

Ah yes, of course. I stand corrected!

There was even the "Master Gear" which let you play master-system games on the game gear. I played the first Phantasy Star game that way.

It is true for Sonic 1, but Sonic 2 is infamously difficult on Game Gear, because the levels where designed with the Master System in mind, and it didn't port well to the smaller Game Gear resolution (160x144 vs 256x192): the assets are the same size, so the effect is almost like a truncated viewport.

https://xkcd.com/768/

That XKCD comic is more than a decade old at this point. Nowadays, graphic calculators for the most part have 32-bit MCUs (or even SoCs for the high-end), color IPS displays with backlights, USB connectors... On the software side, the NumWorks firmware is programmed in modern bare-metal C++.

Even Casio scientific calculators have an on-calc programming language and a spreadsheet nowadays.

At least in the US, most schools are still on the TI train. People have others, but most of the the time they suggest you get a TI-84, which is still super expensive and still a Z80

8-bit CPUs like the 6502 and Z80 are much better for teaching assembly language than something monstrous like the x86. ARM and MIPS are probably okay too.

TI made assembly officially available for a while (starting on the ti-86, I think), but they've walked it back and current calculators need help to get to it.

TI83 had a hidden "asm(" command, it was "Send(9prgmXXXXXXXX", which takes in a hex file then packs it to address 9327. But because it kept two copies of the program in memory (one double size, one half size), people went on to make assembly shells to relocate the program to 9327 without the need for a double-size program. The final assembly shell Venus manged to be absolutely tiny, and did not need to "install" itself (by intentionally creating a memory leak).

Tools exist that can reassemble 8080 assembly language code to run on the 8086 or later x86 CPUs. The opcodes aren't quite the same, but they're close enough feature wise. Indeed it was one of the original design criteria for the 8086 to be source compatible with 8080 code.

Maybe I will check this Sonic port out.

I had to get a TI-84 Plus CE for a college course I took a few years back. I'm an RPN guy so it pained me, but it's a nice step up from the 1990s style TI calculators. It has a fast Z80 family processor, plenty of RAM, a decent 320x240 color display, and a built-in battery that's rechargeable by USB. Usability for everything I used it for is quite good (matrix functions and some root-finding) and almost self-explanatory.

I take it out of the drawer it's in about once a year or so and standby battery life is extremely good. It must cut off power completely in standby.

The TI-84+ battery life was bananas. I used it constantly during university and almost never had to change them.

Which is ultimately a US school problem, as most countries don't have exclusivity deals with calculator companies, TI, Casio and HP all get in, plus whatever fits the requirements.

It not being changed in decades appears to imply there isn't really something families see as a problem, versus others.

At least back in the Stone Age, the TI-84 is for engineering. They made another one that did matrices for business students. The teacher didn’t care that the TI-84 had software that could simulate the matrix functions. By god, TI mailed her a free TI—86 and that’s what we were using. Google says now they’ve all got a matrix button, so that’s nice.

Casios were leagues ahead, tho.

The TI-84 came out in 2004 which I have a hard time calling Stone Age for anything calculator related, graphing or otherwise. But if you were born in 2000 or so perhaps it feels that way. This is also getting well past the time calculators were marketed heavily outside the education market anyway. Also the 84 really is an enhanced 83 which is solidly targeted as a secondary education machine. TI would even sell them etched with “School Property”

https://brownmath.com/ti83/diff8384.htm#Catalog

In the Stone Age of graphing calculators (80s-90s), HP was dominant in engineering disciplines (and France).

Now I think maybe you’re confusing with the TI-85 (but the TI-86 was a TI-85 replacement and handles matrices just fine and superior to the 84) - so then perhaps your teacher had a TI-83. That would be more plausible and sensible.

It was a Ti-83 vs Ti-85.

The first two models were TI-81 and 85. According to my math teacher, it was the years the team lead graduated high school and college, so they were the HS and college level calculators.

The TI83+ CE (color edition) was made because they couldn't get the crappy LCD screens anymore, so they were forced to upgrade the screen, and also upgrade the CPU a bit (now it's an EZ80) because of the higher-resolution frame buffer.

Technically there's the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition before that one, where TI put a color LCD screen on a calculator powered by a Z80, the same one as the TI-84 Plus.

It is reportedly slow as molasses.

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