There have been some quite interesting releases lately, although I didn't have time to report on them until now:

-First of all, recently a new version of Ndless 3.1 was released, adding file association support. For example, like on a computer, now if you select a BMP image, it will automatically open in the appropriate software. In the TI-Nspire case, this means mViewer. So now if you play an nDoom WAD file, simply selecting the .wad.tns file from the TI-Nspire document list will automatically launch nDoom and the game you selected!

It can be downloaded here!


-Secondly, a former TI-68K programmer has recently released the source and executable of what he had from a Metroid clone he was working on over 10 years ago.

There is already a finished Metroid for the 68K series on ticalc.org by Lachprog, but for those who want a game that is closer to Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion rather than Metroid II: Return of Samus, you might want to give Ben Ingrams' demo a try. Hopefully what was released can be useful for an eventual completion of the project by someone else.


-Finally, there have been a few attempts at an online TI emulator in the past, but unfortunately they were rarely reliable or legal. KermMartian has decided to give such project a try now and his attempt so far, jsTIfied, looks very promising. It supports motion blur, meaning grayscale, can accept some applications and to remain legal, you have to provide the ROM yourself to get it to work (currently, 84+ ROMs are not working). The ROM file never makes it to Cemetech server and everything else is done client-side as well, meaning no bandwidth and legal concerns! On top of that, it appears to save your ROM settings over browser sessions. Although it is not finished yet, you can give it a try here! Bug and suggestions can be posted here. You will also find more information in that thread.

Very nice stuff indeed
I like that 68k is getting a bit more active

By the way the Metroid game runs slightly slower on TiEmu than in the screenshot, but the framerate was higher (something around 20 FPS). I am curious if a faster speed would be possible? Maybe if someone rewrote the game or something, with today's more documented 68K stuff.

Else, I guess a TI-Nspire game would be nice, although then you might as well use the original sprites and tiles, so you have the color.

Also as said in the other topic, the emu is pretty nice. I hope Kerm can finish it since it might be quite useful for quick testing.

Yeah that Metroid looks pretty nice.

Well what's wrong with it? Did you send Ndless.cfg.tns along with ndless_resources.tns? What kind of file are you trying to open?

Welcome ingramb! I haven't tried the game(yet) but based on the screenshot it looks very nice.
It's good to see another ti-89 programmer out there, since there aren't too many. I hope you'll stay here a while.

Sadly I'm not much of a calculator programmer anymore.  I still check in on things once in a while, but the 68k scene seems kind of dead.

You are *supposed* to start with just 99 energy, and then pressing the shift key gives you all the powerups.  I guess I could have had all the powerups enabled at the start in the build I released...I will take a look.  I haven't even compiled any 68k code in years, so I don't have any of the dev tools set up.  But it should be just a matter of removing a few lines to disable the cheating :-)  Not all of the powerups are placed in the world yet, but there are a decent number that can be found.

Actually the z80/TI-Nspire scene seems to be both dying down again since the last few months. Go see Omnimaga and Cemetech post stats, for example. A while ago Omni averaged around 400 posts a day, but now it gets above 200 fewer and fewer (basically under 2010 levels). There are still a lot of programs being worked on and released, though. I hope it doesn't become as inactive as in 2008 again at least.

And yeah the 68K scene has never recovered it seems. At least the z80 scene had at least an extra run. I myself don't really code anymore either, actually.