Today, the Omnimaga project is celebrating its 8th anniversary. Omnimaga was founded on September 1st 2001 as attempt to start a programming team at school and release many TI-83+ calculator and PC games (mostly RPGs). Later, in 2002, Omnimaga also produced music. Despite having no website and having been in team for a short period of time, many TI RPGs such as Illusiat and The Reign Of Legends series came out.
In 2004, Omnimaga got its first forum then a month later, a website dedicated to TI calculator RPGs (later Casio and HP). Unfortunately, the team was disbanded and forums shut down and by then, I was no longer making music, so Omnimaga became solely a calculator RPG website until December 2005. Until then, all my TI programs were released under the Epic Programming Studio label until EPS disbanded.
In December 2005, following EPS demise, a new Omnimaga programming team started. This time, the team was online instead of in real life, and it was considerably larger than any other TI programming teams that ever existed, with an average of 25 staff members at once until Fall 2007. During that time, several new games were released, such as Metroid II: Evolution, Grayscale Minesweeper and Skyway 89 and Omnimaga remained the second most active TI calculator discussion forum, behind United-TI, with an average of 1700 posts per day.
Near the end of 2007, inter-community dispute occured, which ended up in Omnimaga demise. Certain staff members decided to remain active on IRC and requested that the old board is brought back up from Invisionfree team and that a temporary board starts up. However, Omnimaga did not recover from the incident and the temporary board was eventually brought down, leaving only the IRC channel open.
Afterward, Omnimaga withdrawed from the TI community and the domain name redirected to a page containing only our music. There were no plan to revive Omnimaga unless the old board is restored before January 1st 2009. However, in August 2008, there was a suddent increase in requests to revive Omnimaga as a calculator site. Finally, after debating the matter on IRC for half of the month, 8 Omnimaga staff plus myself decided that Omnimaga would restart as a brand new forum and programming team. Most staff were from the old team and the old staff files were slowly re-added to the downloads section as well as the RPGs, which aren't all added yet as for today.
Despite a 8 month of incertitude, Omnimaga eventually recovered from the incident and despite having been down for half a year, this forum is still the second most active TI board in the community, still behind United-TI and despite the TI community having became smaller over the past years, many amazing projects are pouring and looks like they will be potential contenders for upcoming POTY awards on Ticalc.org.
I have to thank all our members and staff for having contributed in making Omnimaga survive this long, even through hard times and in a era where graphing calculators are becoming less popular due to other advancing technologies and the economic crisis. Not only you contribute in keeping Omnimaga alive, but you also contribute to the entire community, some of you with amazing games.
As a tribute to Omnimaga 8th anniversary, here is 2009 annual video. This year, it focuses on our most recent releases and most of our upcoming projects.
You can either download it at the following URL:
http://www.omnimaga.org/otherfiles/tribute_to_omnimaga_2009.wmvOr watch it on Youtube below:
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For those who are nostalgic, here are the tribute videos from 2007 and 2008 below:
http://www.omnimaga.org/otherfiles/tribute_to_omnimaga_2007.avihttp://www.omnimaga.org/otherfiles/tribute_to_omnimaga_2008.wmv
