| About Omnimaga |
 Omnimaga is a website dedicated to TI and Casio calculator and PC game programming and music creation of any kind. Aside from our programming team products, the download section also provides TI games and programming tools uploaded by regular forum members and an older section containing the best community-contributed RPGs ever made for any brand of graphing calculators (TI, Casio and HP), including some very rare ones. It is also the home of major TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus products such as Axe Parser on-calc compiled language, the Game Boy emulator TI-Boy SE and TI-Nspire programs such as Ndless, which allows ASM and C programs to be executed on this series of calculator, and gbc4nspire, a GBC emulator. Our community goal is to provide a discussion environment free of any hostility for all coders wanting to learn, give or get help, showcase their work, discuss and have fun. We and the members also have promising game and utility projects coming along, calculator game walkthroughs and programming help available on the forums. Register today if you haven't already to contribute and we hope you enjoy your stay! |
| The History Of Omnimaga, Since 2001 |
| The Offline Era (2001-2004) Omnimaga was founded on September 1st 2001, by Kévin Ouellet (later nicknamed as xlibman, then DJ Omnimaga and now DJ_O). The word Omnimaga is composed of the word magic, prefixed by Omni. Originally, the name was chosen in a computer science class to append to each projects the founder made and was inspired from console RPG magic (initially, the name was going to be Ultimaga, composed with Ultima and magic, but the author's brother already used it in his projects). The original Omnimaga logo represented the three main Final Fantasy magic spells: Fire, Ice and Bolt:  Eventually the founder started using the Omnimaga name in all his TI-83 Plus and computer projects and formed a tiny group of calculator programmers at school. In September 2002, the logo was changed to yellow text on a blue gradient background and an animated spark ball, but was never used in any game and program. In January 2003, a new logo started being used in calculator projects, then a year later, a blue 3D version was created, with slight differences on the "N" (which happens to look like a pi symbol). The 2003 and 2004 logos are still used today.  Several TI-83 Plus BASIC RPGs such as the Illusiat, Mana Force and Reign of Legends series came out under the original programming team, although other members only participated in 3 of them. The HTML Site Era (2004-2005) In March 2004, Omnimaga finally got its first website, hosted on yAronet, then later the "Calculator RPG Headquarter", a site dedicated to TI (and later other brands) RPGs, was created, associated with the Omnimaga name. In September 2004, after lack of activity, the team and forums were disbanded then Omnimaga RPG headquarter became affiliated with Epic Programming Studio forums. Unfortunately, hosting issues caused the site, after having moved from an URL to another during half a year, to go offline for almost two months from December 2004 to January 2005. After finding a new host, Omnimaga RPG website reopened on February 1st 2005 then branched out towards Casio and HP role-playing games. The site finally started to grow in popularity afterward. The Invisionfree Era (2005-2008) In May 2005 the site was moved to Invisionfree and the entire content was integrated into a forum system with a portal, with the ability to comment on news items and discuss community RPG projects. After requests from members and in response to TI community hostility incidents at the time, an entire new forum was opened again, which, unlike on yAronet, had much higher activity. An IRC channel called #omnimaga was also created. After the demise of Epic Programming Studio team in December 2005, the founder of Omnimaga started a new programming again, this time with online users. The site slogan was then changed to "A New Coding Utopia Awaits". The team (which got the "Coders of Tomorrow" name a few months after its creation) and the forums had great success and many programs such as Metroid 83+ and Metroid II: Evolution were released under Omnimaga name during the first half of 2006, but staff disputes and inter-community disputes caused stability problems at Omnimaga for the rest of 2006. The site had a slow growth period for the first half of 2007, but then picked up again that Summer after DJ returned from a long period of inactivity due to lack of Internet access. The Demise Despite the high site activity after Summer 2007, the TI community started showing signs of weakness and there was an increasing amount of inter-community problems, which were mostly indirect attacks towards Omnimaga and its way of operating. Eventually it started to hurt the site userbase and lead to Omnimaga demise. After the site closer in early 2008, the IRC channel remained online as a music producing channel and there were plans to open a site dedicated solely to the music that was present on Omnimaga website and future songs by former staff, but with no affiliation with the TI community. The Revival and the SMF Era (2008-Today) At the end of Summer 2008, a few former Omnimaga staff started suggesting that Omnimaga restarts from scratch as a calculator website. Initially the founder was not interested, but he changed his mind after an increasing amount of interest towards the site and programming revival. On August 25th, a new site started on 1and1 hosting and a new forum system and on Omnimaga 7th anniverary, the official re-opening occured. Despite the re-opening having never been officially announced anywhere, the new forums activity still managed to reach levels similar to the most active TI forums at the time, partly due to the overall TI community inactivity. However, the new Omnimaga became the home of several major projects like F-Zero 83+ and TI-Boy SE, as well as a programming contest, which caused the site to pick up in popularity again. During 2009, there was a resurgence in hostility on certain other sites, which, unlike in 2006-07, caused certain users to migrate to Omnimaga, as the site was meant to be free of hostility, and those people did not want another "2008". This, combined with the arrival of major projects like Axe Parser,major breakthroughs in the TI-Nspire scene and our revived focus towards TI community development news afterward, caused Omnimaga popularity and activity to start increasing exponentially. In late 2010, we moved from 1and1 to a faster hosting provider, Aspiration Hosting, then after the arrival of the fx-cg10/20 calculator models (Casio PRIZM) Omnimaga forums branched out towards Casio development and had success in that area. The site also became the home of Ndless, the tool that allows ASM and C programs to be ran on TI-Nspire calculators, and the forums branched out towards computer programming and web development as well. On September 1st 2011, Omnimaga will exist for a decade and its new incarnation didn't lose the game yet, unlike the past ones, and it seems that the site is destined to continue having success in long terms and that the team will never give you up in the calculator programming scene. Below you can see the many Omnimaga banners that got used on our website since April 9th 2004.  The second one is from September 2004, the third one February 2005 and the fourth one May 2005. The slogan was changed to "A New Coding Utopia Awaits" after the online programming team started in December 2005, then to "The Coders of Tomorrow" in April 2006 (the same name as the team). The same banner was used on the new site in 2008, but got rid of the v3 text. The last banner is the one we've been using since February 2008, and is inspired from the 2005 banners. You can find statistics of the current site, forums and even monthly posting statistics since the yAronet era on this page. |