Tonight in our archives there are two new TI programming tools. The first one is a super-extreme-ultimate-mega-rare-and-ridiculously-hard-to-find On-Calc programming editor called Fast RPL, originally released in 2007 on FastRPL.Info by Kuda and McBeach from the TI French Team, but the site shutted down since then and very few people still have a copy of the Flash application. Despite its huge size on-calc, this program editor allows you to make games using a reverse-polish-notation based programming language (like on HP calculators), which, if you know some z80 assembly stuff and are used to RPN, can be much easier than to actually code in straight assembly, while still producing games much faster than TI-BASIC language. Unfortunately the documentation is in french but the file can be downloaded here anyway:

http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=296

The second programming tool added is another On-Calc programming language and alternative to TI-BASIC called BBC BASIC, by Benryves from MaxCoderz, which is based on an old PC programming language from the late '80s. Like FastRPL, this one is not finished yet and it is intended to be easier than z80 ASM, but faster than TI-BASIC. However, unlike FastRPL, this one is much easier to learn and program, due to the syntax being similar to BASIC language and it is still being developped. The reason why I am uploading this beta on Omnimaga, despite not being officially released outside from its original website either, is because you have no idea how much pain and trouble I got to even login on MaxCoderz forums (Having forgotten my password I had to reset it and reactivate my account. However when I tried to login again after doing so, it kept saying my password was corrupted. After 2 tries I decided to register a new account instead, but for some reasons when trying to enter a nickname longer than 4 characters it would say my nickname is too long, even thought I see new members with much longer nicknames signing up and validating regulary. I also had to use a different e-mail address due to the duplicate account protection but when I signed up I never received the activation e-mail, even thought it was also being sent to a Gmail address like my old one. At the end I tried logging in with my old account again, sending a new password and revalidating, but this time it worked! So I could finally access my old account as well as the member-only BBC Basic project sub-forum). The BBC Basic sub-forum require guests to register an account and login to be accessed so knowing the past MC forums problems due to PHPBB and seeing the problems with the upgrade, I decided to make it avaliable in Omnimaga archives as a mirror in case people get trouble accessing the beta on MC forums. Here are some screenshots and the link to the file page:


http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=297

And in case there may be unnoticed updates and if you want more information (and can login), you can check the BBC BASIC sub-forum at MaxCoderz here:

http://www.junemann.nl/maxcoderz/viewforum.php?f=37

On the Casio side, despite being old news, there is now MLC on the FX-9860G/Graph 85 series. Unfortunately almost every link to MLC downloads are no longer working, including those on BFR website, so the beta might be outdated. It can be found here, though:

http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=294

UPDATE Jan 14th 09: Courtesy of a member of Casiocalc.org, the beta of MLC2 is now avaliable in our archives as well!

The dream of BASIC programmers wanting an easier but faster language on graphing calculators has finally come true after over 9000 days of waiting and there's more to come at MaxCoderz.

Besides alternatives to TI-BASIC and ASM, the Omnimaga Casio and HP programming tools archives has been brought back up, altough there aren't much there. I couldn't provide the latest version of MLC for the Algebra FX besides the one from the old Omnimaga website, though, because as mentionned above, all links are down everywhere.

Yeah BBC does look great hopefully MLC will be that good once I get it done. It is being worked on I promise, it's just coming along slowly...

Wow, I didn't know BBC Basic was that far along.  Do the commands have to be typed in letter by letter or does it use some kind of token system?

It is wrote in letters and tokenized for the interpretation or something, from what I know from reading.

Anyway this gap in between ASM and TI-BASIC must be filled. And C, and other alternatives didn't resolved much the problem.

Aah that's good. I was thinking this was a mistake, but it could have been that they wanted this to be a member-only project, to attract new members, but given the forums bugs it can be a bit cumbersome to register

It's not that I hate PHPBB because it was one option for when I revived Omnimaga and moved TIMGUL from IPB, in fact it got much more secure in the past 2 years, but there are still some problems with forums acting weirdly sometimes, altough a lot of these might be caused by most mods being buggy as hell (to the point where the entire forum gets broken and the admin has to restart from scratch sometimes), and the most notable problem was when I showed up as tr1p1ea and Kalan_vod once, even if I'm just guests, and after the upgrade, that 4 character nickname lenght cap . Invisionfree also had its bugs, being a stripped-down modified version of IPB 1.3.1 final. It is 99.9% secure, the only security problem being if you go to the admin panel from a public computer and forget to clear your browsing history afterward, then anyone using the computer only an hour afterward will be able to use the latest link with the session ID to access the admin panel. There's also the lack of spambots protection. But there's the bugs like the not working "View New Posts" feature, member list showing more pages than supposed if there are membergroups hidden from the list, a rare bug that causes the Inbox link to display that you have -1 unread messages (yes, I really mean -1, not 1)

We'll have to get working on MLC bfr...ha this summer perhaps.

thanks. Actually in the future I had plans to expand the RPG section toward adventure games too, altough only extremly good ones with some minor rpg elements or occuring in middle age, like Castlevania. But then some people may complain that Metroid isn't in the archives ;.;

Hi benryves and nice userbar lol. It's ok about the member-only thing it's just that I had so much troubles logging in again (which also happened several times over Cemetech before).

I am happy the programs are tokenized, because this was one downside of the old MLC1 project for the 86 of having each commands be made of alpha letter tokens. Because of this the programs would grow huge pretty fast and limit developpement a lot. They were edited in the PRGM editor actually

wasn't it 8.1 or 8.8 KB? Or was it on the 83+? And yeah not being able to edit programs after compressing them was quite an issue. SOmething like TI-86 BASIC would have been cool. IN TI-86 BASIC when you run a BASIC program the calc tokenize it and it takes less RAM. When you edit it it gets detokenized