The State of the TI Community (1999)

> the days of the regular NES. […] back then games were good. There were only a handful out there and they were well-crafted. The emphasis was gameplay and design. […] By the time we reach the days of the N64, Playstation, and high-end PC's, we don't have a whole lot.

Two reasons for that:

1. The NES was just after of the big video game crash of 1983†. The video game market had imploded, and only really good games would get made, as nothing else would sell at all. Games before this, like on the Atari 2600, were mostly all crap, if you average them all; it’s only in hindsight that we mostly remember the few good games.

2. Nintendo had an iron grip on the NES platform, partly as a response to said crash. They would only release good games. On other later (but still contemporary) popular open platforms, like the Commodore 64, quality varied wildly, and crap games were all over the place.

† <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_game_crash_...>

What a great characterization of that point in time.

As for games, the average time span between releases of stuff I find playworthy has grown to over 5 years.

I am still grateful for TIGCC, a port of GCC that cross-compiles C to m68k and has a linker for the executable format of my TI-89 Titanium. It was published on ticalc.org in the previous millennium and still works on my Mac to this day.

What is Ticalc.org doing here? (Yes, I have some featured programs there...)

Gotta give huge props to the ticalc.org staff for keeping the website up.

I am very grateful to to the people behind ticalc.org and the whole community. I was in high school at the time, with a brand new TI-89 and a lot of free time, and it was wonderful. I am not going to name names but the whole community was fantastic and very welcoming for a teenage nerd. In retrospect, I wish I had enough experience to enjoy these couple of years more than I did. To me it felt normal, but now I realise that it was a minor golden age.

It is interesting that Justin regrets the NES. I do not remember reading that post at the time, but it would have sounded like grandpa yelling at clouds to me. The NES was something that happened when I was 4 or something; it was prehistoric.

In contrast, my successive TIs were much better than consoles to me (though I played Dreamcast and PC games as well). It was comparatively easy to dig quite deep into embedded programming and whilst I never really did any assembler on it, I used TIGCC quite a lot. And programs compiled with it; I still start Phoenix II on my TI 89-Ti every now and then.

The good thing is that we can now say that the TI community had some very good years ahead in 1999, possibly much better than the years before that this post laments. However, I am sad that the scene was mostly gone by 2005.

Anyway, it was a good ride.

Pretty sure this is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jkarneges - would love to hear their reflections, 25 years later

Sweet summer child. If only he could have seen what games had become in 2024, where every other is a copy/pasted survival game on Unreal 4 pre-released as soon as possible.