Ok, so I know updating a tilemap every frame when you want grayscale is not really a good idea, since there are much faster ways to have grayscale, but I just thought I would share this with you as it shows how fast Axe parser can be.

Nearly flickerless 4 level grayscale with 97 sprites being drawn EVERY frame!

In the following program, you control a square that blinks back and forth from light gray to dark gray and cannot go outside the screen. To increase the delay (which is absent by default) press + and to decrease it press -. Should be useful to calibrate the grayscale with your calc.

The screenshot shows it in action in 6 MHz and 15 MHz mode

Somehow I also feel TI-BASIC popularity will drop quite a bit with Axe, since a lot of BASIC coders now use Axe a lot. However I think there'll still be a few BASIC and ASM coders in the future, like with 68K calcs.

And yeah seeing how fast this renders in 6 MHz mode, I am even more confident about Axe potential.

Maybe a compiler that converts axe->asm text instructions, to allow for hand-optimizing

Actually in BASIC larger games are possible too, while abusing asm libs. Example: I doubt you can fit Illusiat 13 in an Axe program. Way too much code and stuff for the engine (especially the menu and battle engine). A RPG in axe would most likely need to be split into multiple prog which are ran from a BASIC program using XCOPY ASM lib.

But I speak from experience after seeing TI-89 BASIC and ASM popularity go down a lot after TIGCC became good. Now ASM is only really used for stuff that requires a lot of speed and TI-BASIC is rarely used anymore either for games, compared to when I joined the community in 2001.

TI-BASIC and ASM will never die, though. Plus Axe programs can be used as ASM libs in BASIC games too, for people who don't feel like coding an entire Axe game

IIRC it's a bad idea to write directly to flash unless you really know what you're doing. Not to mention repeat compiling to Archive will wear it more quickly. Also, messing up can go really badly. Corrupting you're Archive can never end well...

Ok so the following is a bit more flickery since I added more stuff, but still fast:

Of course!

But I'll probably need to manipulate grayscale in some special way to not have the whole flickering happen while scrolling, because as you can see in that screenshot, when stuff moves around, it looks horrible.

This is why I am glad in some ways that Quigibo added a manual grayscale command, where we can decide when to refresh the screen ourselves

Thanks!