In a news that was posted three and half a years ago, we justified any possible length of time (even 16 years) as an acceptable hiatus for a calculator project. However, this time, for one TI-83 Plus/84 Plus game in particular, it will finally have taken 12 fewer years before project necromancy happens to it.

Tonight, I am proud to announce that Supersonic Ball v1.0 has been completed, after 3.5 years of hiatus, and has now been released in the archives!



This project was started in July 2010, back in the early days of Axe Parser, but went into hiatus until September 2013. Supersonic Ball is a simple side-scrolling platformer/tunnel hybrid where you control a bouncing ball, guiding it to the end of each level. Challenge lies in getting through narrow areas or climbing stuff without bouncing back, and it gets progressively harder to do so as the game progresses. The game features physics, randomized levels, animated graphics (or sometimes grayscale), smooth scrolling and parallax backgrounds. Try to get as far as possible as fast as you can without running out of time to get the highest score!

The game runs in 6 MHz mode, except during level loading, so it will work on all monochrome TI-83+/84+ models, although minor lag will occur on the black 83+ model when switching levels.

Although this is officially my final Axe project, this is definitively not gonna be my last calculator game ever. After a 2 years hiatus from programming in general, the announcment of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition revived my interest again, although I am planning to stick with TI and HP BASIC from now on. Recently, I also released a fast color Tunnel clone for the HP Prime, a port of my HP 39gII version released earlier this year.

Download Supersonic Ball v1.0

Well I did start coding again as early as December 2012 (when the color Z80 calc got leaked) but I only did TI-BASIC until a few days ago (although I don't plan to get into Axe again, since I found it too complicated for non-graphic stuff )

Also thanks. My max score is 4127. The trick is to slow down during narrow parts to avoid bouncing back too far, but not going out of control can be hard lol. One level that is particularly hard is the one where the light goes out every 1.5 second or so, because you don't see where you're going all the time. The psychedelic level shortly beforehand isn't that hard, though, since the path is similar to level 6, it's just hard to see anything lol.

As for the late easy levels you have to be careful too because there is usually very little extra time added, so you still need to rush through them fast to stock enough time for the harder levels.

By the way each level are 17 bytes large (excluding the sprite data).

art: you accidentally double-posted.
DJ: great job, can't wait to see more of your projects!

Nice DJ, I'll try it out ^_^

EDIT: Woo, got 1297 lol.

Thanks guys

An excellent game, haven't made it past the strobe level