Illusiat remake for the TI-81 and some discoveries

[TravisE]

Hi, I was tempted to dig out my ancient TI-81 and try this out. This thing was my first graphing calculator waaayy back in 1994 or so. I've only been playing it for a few minutes so far, but given the extreme programming limitations, this is really impressive. This isn't the type of game I would have imagined being possible on a TI-81, especially not with ASCII-art graphics (even simple ones).

As silly as this may sound, I really think this deserves a news article on ticalc.org. If you upload a copy of Illusiat 81 there, I will be the first one to suggest it.

I think there may be a couple of minor errors in the source code file. I had to ignore the “Grid Off” instruction in Pgrm1 since to my knowledge there is no such instruction on the TI-81 (or at least not on mine). Also, after typing everything in and double-checking it, the up/down controls on the map seemed to be reversed, which confused me a bit at first. It seems that in Prgm3 on the line that displays the map movement prompt the ‘V’ and ‘^’ are backwards. When I swapped them, map movement made a lot more sense.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Well I thought this could maybe make news, both because of how in depth it is for a TI-81, being the first TI-81 RPG to be released and the first upload in the TI-81 directory since maybe 5 or 6 years, but due to some events that occured one year ago in the community I requested the removal of my entire author profile there (altough it took them 4 and half a month to remove it) and am not planning to upload anymore stuff on any english TI site in the future. So since ticalc.org only feature programs in their own archives (at least since Michael_V was hired as news editor)

I would go into further details but I lost the huge post I did about this back then and it was filled with english mistakes anyway (which caused a lot of mockery among grammar nazis in a IRC channel, even thought they know english is not my native language) and I don't feel like rexplaining right now . You might find some older posts about this here on the forums though.

As for the game itself, there might have been some errors while I typed it by hand. The GridOff function is avaliable in the MODE menu. I added it because I was planning to add graphical magic animations, but then I found out the only way to turn axis off was to Dim the window so the dots and the actual axis are out of the screen so it was too much hassle to fit animations afterward in the limited RAM. However when I decided to go with home screen animations I totally forgot to remove the GridOff from the code. I actually started typing it before adding the home screen animations so I don't remember if it was on the real calc.

Welcome by the way

[TravisE]

Well I thought this could maybe make news, both because of how in depth it is for a TI-81, being the first TI-81 RPG to be released and the first upload in the TI-81 directory since maybe 5 or 6 years, but due to some events that occured one year ago in the community I requested the removal of my entire author profile there (altough it took them 4 and half a month to remove it) and am not planning to upload anymore stuff on any english TI site in the future. So since ticalc.org only feature programs in their own archives (at least since Michael_V was hired as news editor)

That's too bad, but since you're the author, that's your choice.

As for the game itself, there might have been some errors while I typed it by hand. The GridOff function is avaliable in the MODE menu. I added it because I was planning to add graphical magic animations, but then I found out the only way to turn axis off was to Dim the window so the dots and the actual axis are out of the screen so it was too much hassle to fit animations afterward in the limited RAM. However when I decided to go with home screen animations I totally forgot to remove the GridOff from the code. I actually started typing it before adding the home screen animations so I don't remember if it was on the real calc.

I thought I might have been overlooking it somewhere. I didn't even remember that GridOn was actually available on the TI-81, but then again it's been years since I touched the thing.

Welcome by the way

Thanks!

I think I got up to the last boss (is the last boss where it says “Now see my true power!” and you have to do a second battle immediately?), but unfortunately my TI-81 locked up for some strange reason (no idea why, it's never happened before) when I left it on on the Illusiat main menu for a while, and since I don't feel like typing it back in and starting over at the moment, I guess I'm done for the time being.

[metagross111]

how long is the guy, btw?

[DJ Omnimaga]

ouch this sucks about the locking down , I didn't got that problem yet, it would have sucked if I did while coding the game and had to restart from scratch

As for the GridOff it's definitively inside the game and even used, you really need to access the MODE menu from the PRGM editor to access the function. However, the character movement choices in Prgm3 were definitviely swapped so I updated the zip file with the new version