I like the tiles ideas. I am curious about how it will be when we can fall off the track and die.

By the way, since this seems like an official game project, do you think we should move this topic to the HP Prime projects sub-forum at http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?board=212.0 ? (Other calc projects and ideas->HP Prime)

Both are 15 MHz and have similar hardware except the hidden RAM (unless the 84+ you get is from before April 2007, where the hidden RAM, 128 KB, is identical). As for emulators, the only emulators I know of for the color model is jsTIfied (although it requires an high end computer) and I think that some recent versions of TilEm have color 84+ support too there, but it's lost somewhere on Cemetech forums.

Glad to hear! Also did Amazon tell you that? I hope so. Also I heard that UPS had many delays over here lately, which caused much backlash from customers, so I assume that USPS and others did too.

Just a suggestion, though: Try to continue coding on the computer then when ready to test speed on calc, close the connectivity kit then connect the calc then send the file with the emulator (it takes several seconds). Otherwise, it's a bit annoying on the calculator because some symbols are harder to access and the editor kinda lags when the code is large. At least the HP Prime makes this much easier compared to TI calcs, because with TI calcs, most emulators lack the support to send directly to the calculator, so there are many steps required to test on a real calculator for those who code on the computer.

Oh ok that's good. IMHO I don't plan on ever ordering from Amazon vendors again. I had too many bad experiences with them compared to Ebay sellers.

Regardless, though, backup often. Losing progress every 5 minute is annoying and I see your program is getting a bit large, so inevitably the emulator might crash more.

Also for the title screen and stuff, do you plan to use some special effects like fade in/out? (see other thread)

I like the new track and graphics. It looks very nice. I also like how the ball appears below the track, it looks good when falling down. Also lol it's quite hard actually. Hopefully the final version has multiple levels with different difficulties.

Just a few things:

-Do you ever plan to move the track at the bottom of the screen and add a sky at the top with an HUD? It might look more polished/professional that way, else people might think the game was rushed if it remains with the bottom half of the screen nearly empty.

-If BLIT_P(G1,  xEnds(ray, 1),  ray + 20,  xEnds(ray, 2),  ray + 24,  G4, 0, (rayTable(ray) + camPosition) / 8, 160, (rayTable(ray) + camPosition) / 8, #FF00FF) is changed to BLIT_P(G1,  xEnds(ray, 1),  ray + 20,  xEnds(ray, 2),  ray + 22,  G4, 0, (rayTable(ray) + camPosition) / 8, 160, (rayTable(ray) + camPosition) / 8, #FF00FF), it could slightly improve speed, but then you lose the 3D effect. I would show you an idea to do a 3D effect, but sadly the emulator doesn't like my code (Whitespace bug). That said, I think my idea would be slower anyway (although it allowed the walls to be shaded).

-I get error invalid input at the end of the track.

Scrolling clouds would be nice I guess, but yeah I think frame rate might be an issue if there are two mode-7-like layers. I wonder... would it be hard to make it so the camera always follows the ball and that it's the race track that moves around like in Rad Racer for the NES, for example? This would allow larger tracks, but of course might slow the game down since this would mean extra columns of tiles being shown on the left and right far away.

As for the unintentional 3D effect, since it was unintentional, do you think you could bring back the 3D-like wall tiles there was in the previous version? Although they were not perfect, they still gave some sense of depth to the track.

In fact I had a simple horizontal scrolling in mind for the clouds, the frame rate wouldn't survive another projected scrolling for sure ^^'
Something like 2 blits with offset from a tileable clouds texture would be far enough I guess.

What you saw in previous version was an attempt to use the big track grob to render the 3D effect, with two issues : perspective is screwed up and using actual texture looked very bad because of far distance flickering. It would make more sense now that the resolution is doubled though.

The graphics could be improved further without any performance cost by using 32x16 textures instead of 32x8. But I don't know what is the grob size limit and if the big track grob could be doubled without limiting track length too much.

You may be able to improve the speed by a large amount by switching to MAKELIST or MAKEMAT commands rather than appending elements to an existing list, etc.

I was wondering if append() was really an efficient way to create my tables. Thanks for the tip. It won't change the speed of the game but certainly make the wait period a bit shorter which is always good.

Last minor snapshot (0.0.6) before major update !

The game is now fully playable, first post updated.

Next things to do :
graphics improvements (including but not limited to landscape, game logo, friendly time format, HUD, animated ball and more),
menus,
track selection,
user tracks creation and loading,
moar tracks !
powerups ?

Edit : my best time so far for this version is 21159 18361 18241 18188 18057 17570. (To myself : stop playing and go to bed dude !)