Halifax! Long time no see! ^_^

Yeah, personally I still consider it hybrid. With no ASM you need to rely on 24 KB of RAM and for a long game like Illusiat you must split it into chapters where the player archive/unarchive stuff manually in the middle of the game. Also you can't do dynamic program execution such as
Repear A>=0 and A<=9:Prompt A:End:0->X:"MAPDATA"+sub("0123456789",A,1:Asm(prgmXCOPY:prgmXTEMP000:0->X:Asm(prgmXCOPY

My concern, though, is what hybrid programs should be forced to compete against ASM and what not. For hybrid games only using an utility such as XCOPY or Resource, this might be unfair since ASM would have a clear advantage on graphic speed or quality

Yea that's what we're probably going to do.

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My concern, though, is what hybrid programs should be forced to compete against ASM and what not. For hybrid games only using an utility such as XCOPY or Resource, this might be unfair since ASM would have a clear advantage on graphic speed or quality

I agree. That may be unfair, and thus I think there should be three categories in fact: BASIC, hybrid-BASIC, and ASM. But ASM is no walk in the park either, so it might balance itself out. In the end, I still think 3 categories would probably be the most fair.

That's true, but one thing we have to keep in mind is $$$

Yeah true, $$$ can be a serious issue. I'm not affected by the economic crisis at work, but food price has skyrocketed in the past year and I still got the rent, the power bill, internet, phone and insurances to pay. And before someone tells me I should get a more payful job, I would rather stay where I am right now because I'm treated better than at many places and no matter how bad the economy will go in the near future, I'll still keep my job. Because it's a low prices supermarket, business has increased instead of decreasing over here because people who used to go at more expensive supermarkets now come over here instead since they're trying to save as much money as possible. Wal Mart isn't a threat because they seem to have a mentality of installing their stores in the middle of nowhere or far away from residential districts. But still, unless I got more money in the future on a regular basis, more categories could mean smaller prizes.

Had the contest got only one category the prize would have been a Casio FX-9860G or an used TI-86

Uhhh, isn't it already in the same category?

Technically I was supposed to enter Illusiat 13 for the zContest 2009 ( http://www.yaronet.com/forum.php?s=493 ) for the hybrid category, but for some reasons, the contest appears to have died. I even read a post from the author saying he didn,t have the motivation and time to restart it

It really needs a miscellaneous category, as this would include stuff like ease of installation, user friendliness, and not having hundreds of files on the calculator like Contra (well, maybe not that many).

I think "size" covers the whole lots of files thing.  But you also have to consider the fact that you're limited to ~24 kb of RAM, and subprograms or lists (like with Contra83) can save a considerable amount of memory if used correctly.

You do raise a good point about installation and user-friendliness though

[edit]  It looks like we forgot a general "game play" scoring category, which is kind of odd...